California is experiencing a wildfire of a COVID-19 crisis surpassing 3 million COVID-19 cases this week. The state reported 694 new Covid-19 related deaths January 20, 2021, its second highest single day toll to date. As of January 20, 2021, California had a total of 3,019,371 confirmed infections. More than 20,800 people hospitalized across the state for Covid-19. Approximately 4,750 of those patients are in intensive care units.
The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County is particularly hard hit. A dozen mobile refrigerated trailers are parked in the county morgue parking lot to handle all the bodies. Each trailer can store 25 bodies. Overwhelmed funeral homes are forced to turn families away.
As the pandemic rages in California, medics are being told to ration oxygen. At the start of the new year, oxygen and the medical supplies associated with it were hard to come by in parts of Southern California and some hospital administrators worried they would have to choose which patients get these resources during the next COVID-19 surge.
There is hope that the vaccine roll out might help curb the surge in deaths. However the vaccine roll out has been slow, coming in fits and starts. San Francisco’s public health department will run out of covid-19 vaccine January 21, 2021 because the city’s allocation dropped substantially from a week ago and doses that had to be discarded were not replaced. Two thirds of the state is under a regional stay-at-home orders based on ICU capacity. Sleep Train Arena, the former home of the Sacramento Kings north of Sacramento’s downtown has been turned into a COVID-19 treatment facility to ease the strain on southern California hospitals. The arena should be able to handle 244 patients with the proper staffing and resources. Creating more bed space is easy, but finding staff for these facilities is the dilemma.
California health officials and researchers at the state’s universities and hospitals are trying to learn more about another variant of the coronavirus. Only days after the so-called “UK variant” was identified here in the state, a different, separate variant has now been traced to outbreaks in Santa Clara County. The UK variant spreads more easily being more infectious. Researchers are trying to find out if the the California variant is also more infectious.
Los Angeles International Airport is now offering COVID-19 test results in as little as 30 minutes with the addition of rapid antigen tests at the airport’s on-site laboratory. The nasal-swab antigen tests are available only at the Terminal 6 lab location and cost $80. California officials are pinning their hopes on the newly inaugurated President Joe Biden as they struggle to obtain coronavirus vaccines to curb the surge that has packed hospitals and morgues in the state.