County Reports 13,315 New COVID-19 Cases on Sunday

LA County reported 13,315 new cases of COVID-19 and 58 additional deaths today, along with another new record for hospitalizations related to the coronavirus.

The numbers bring the county’s totals to 623,670 cases and 8,875 fatalities since the pandemic began in March.

There are 5,549 people in county hospitals with the virus.

On Dec. 11, the county reached 500,000 cases, and since then, more than 100,000 new cases have been reported — the fastest acceleration of new cases during the pandemic.

If there is a light on the horizon, it is that Pfizer’s initial vaccine allocation is currently being used by acute-care hospitals to vaccinate frontline health care personnel. A second allotment of Pfizer vaccine is anticipated to arrive next week and will be used to inoculate additional health care workers at acute-care hospitals, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced.

“While we now see the light at the end of the tunnel, we haven’t reached the light yet,” said Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. “The pandemic is going to continue for many, many months after we begin vaccinating people. This is not the time to start ignoring public health advice and recommendations. Our hospitals are critically overcrowded in L.A. County.

“L.A. County is now moving towards becoming the epicenter of the pandemic,” he said. “We are not at the stage yet at which other parts of the world, including in the United States, have suffered catastrophic consequences, but we are heading in that direction. And if we don’t stop the spread, our hospitals will be overwhelmed.”

Hospital capacity across the county is very limited, and health care workers are hard-pressed to keep up with the need for care.

“We’re getting crushed. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are getting crushed,” said Spellberg. “For most of the days of the last week, we’ve had zero ICU beds open in the morning, and we have had to scramble — ‘Can we move this patient here, can we move that patient there.’ … We’re already expanding care into areas of the hospital we don’t normally provide that type of care in.

“ … And it isn’t just COVID patients,” he said. “It’s car accidents and heart attacks and victims of violence. They need a place to go to receive critical care. We can only react. We cannot stop the spread. We need the public to listen to these mitigation strategies to slow the spread or we will completely run out of beds.”

Spellberg also voiced the frustration felt by health care workers caused by those who deny the severity of the virus and downplay its impact on hospitals.

“The amount of moral courage it takes to run toward the danger makes it very frustrating for our heroes every day to come to our hospitals and care for patients when we see video and hear people not taking the public health strategies seriously,” he said.

His comments came amid a surge of cases that has exploded across the county since November, exacerbated by the Thanksgiving holiday and accompanying gatherings that occurred in spite of warnings against them.

Dr. Christina Ghaly said that as of Friday morning, there were 699 total available hospital beds in Los Angeles County — with a population of 10 million people — and just 69 ICU beds. Ghaly noted that the figures represent a “snapshot in time” from a daily morning poll of the county’s 70 “911-receiving” hospitals with emergency rooms, and the numbers can fluctuate dramatically throughout the day.

In recent days, county hospitals have been operating near their overall licensed capacity of about 2,500 ICU beds. Last week, county hospitals operated an overall average of about 10,360 non-ICU beds per day, based on physical space and available staffing. Overall, county hospitals are licensed to operate about 17,000 non-ICU beds, but that number is restricted by the availability of staffing to treat patients.