VIEJO MISSION, Calif. (Reuters) – Southern California is so overwhelmed by coronavirus cases that patients are supported in trying to enter hospitals, and corpses are locked in another logjam after they leave.
At a hospital in Orange County, ambulances loaded with patients line up outside waiting for space in the intensive care unit, and patients with COVID-19 fill the lobby of the emergency room.
In nearby Los Angeles County, where people die from the disease at a rate of once every eight minutes and in other severely affected areas, refrigerated trailers will be brought in to provide additional storage capacity for the bodies.
“When we fill with patients with COVID, we can’t take care of the community at large,” said Dr. Jim Keany, 54, the administrative partner of emergency physicians at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. “Every bed is full, every nurse and doctor is busy taking care of COVID patients.”
A patient waited in the ambulance for more than five hours before being hospitalized, Keany said.
Despite strict home stay measures that were fortified in most of the state last month, California, the most populous state with nearly 40 million people, leads the United States with nearly 2.6 million COVID-19 cases. , more than a million more than the next state, according to a number of official data from Reuters.
Its death toll is over 28,000, only in New York and Texas.
With the bodies piled up, the California Emergency Services Office said it had arranged to send 88 trailers to needy areas around the state.
The Los Angeles coroner’s office will receive 10 morgue trailers, in addition to 12 installed there in April, spokeswoman Sarah Ardalani said.
Orange County officials previously allowed hospitals to divert patients elsewhere when they were full, but now that virtually all hospitals have reached capacity, the policy has been canceled, resulting in long waiting times for treatment, Keany said.
“We are pushing our carpenters and facility people to the extreme, trying to build a space where we can manage patients,” Keany said.
Dr. Robert Goldberg, 44, a lung care and critical care physician at Providence Mission Hospital, urged the public to help reduce the threat by wearing masks, maintaining social distance and getting the vaccine once it becomes available.
“COVID is real. Life is in danger, “Goldberg said. “People of all ages are dying. We have to work together. We have to go through this together. “
Reporting by Lucy Nicholson; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman and Jane Ross; Written by Daniel Trotta; Mountainous of William Mallard