Huntington Hospital Doctor: ‘We’re Hanging On By Our Fingernails’

A Huntington Hospital doctor appearing on CNN Sunday morning talked about the worsening situation at the local hospital.  

“It’s a moment of dread we are trying to deal with,” said Dr. Kim Shriner, an infectious disease control specialist. 

“Right now, we are just kind of hanging on by our fingernails,” Shriner said.

Shriner said she continues to hear the same cautionary tale every day from patients who say they wished they had not attended large gatherings. 

As of Sunday, 30 of 189 patients fighting the coronavirus are in the facility’s intensive care unit, which Shriner says has been expanded, as has the hospital’s nurse-to-patient ratio.

The recent COVID-19 surge has left Huntington Hospital and other medical facilities across the region struggling to deal with declining ICU capacity and an influx of patients.

Huntington Hospital has set up triage tents outside for patients experiencing non-life-threatening emergencies. 

Pasadena and Los Angeles County health officials have pleaded with the public to lessen the impact of a predicted COVID-19 “surge on top of a surge” last week by not gathering with anyone from outside of their households over the holiday weekend.

“Unfortunately, we’re currently seeing the highest number of COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, with a 900% increase in the number of new cases each day, compared to the beginning of November, now at 125 new cases a day in Pasadena,” said Pasadena Public Health Director Dr. Ying-Ying Goh.

“This has resulted in a surge of hospitalizations and deaths and is not showing any sign of decreasing. In fact, we are expecting an additional holiday surge on top of this surge,” Goh said.

“Our health care system is strained to its limits, with intensive care [availability] in Southern California at 0%,” according to Goh.

Health officials are expecting a post-holiday surge. More than 500,000 people flew out of the nation’s airports to be with family members during the holidays.

“We very well might see a post-seasonal [surge] in the sense of Christmas/New Year’s,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “I’ve described it as a surge upon a surge because if you look at the slope, the incline of cases we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon to be early winter, it is really quite troubling.’