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“A surge on top of a surge”

The holidays were not kind to California. New infections in the state have skyrocketed — driven by Thanksgiving gatherings and then Christmas festivities — despite weekslong lockdowns in December throughout much of the state. Now, Gov. Gavin Newsom is warning of “a surge on top of a surge” linked to the holidays that will only get worse in the coming weeks.

The situation is perhaps most dire in Los Angeles County, where it’s estimated that one person becomes infected every six seconds, and one person dies every 10 minutes. The latest crisis has stretched the health care system there so thin that incoming patients at one hospital were told to wait in an outdoor tent. The region is running out of oxygen, and ambulance crews have been instructed to stop transporting people who have little chance of survival.

California has the second highest rate of new cases per 100,000 people after Arizona. Over the past month, the number of Covid-19 patients in California hospitals has doubled, and many intensive care units are overflowing. In Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, intensive care units are at zero percent capacity.

More inoculations would help ease California’s burden, but as with the rest of the country, the vaccine rollout in California has been sluggish, with only about a third of the state’s 1.3 million doses reaching the arms of patients. Worryingly, at least six people in the state have been found to have been infected with the new, more transmissible variant of the virus.

There has been some progress. Infection rates appear to have stabilized in recent days, but reporting anomalies tied to the holidays mean that it may be another week before we have a solid understand of how much the virus has recently spread.

Even if infection rates slow, my colleague Shawn Hubler, who covers California, said officials were bracing for a harrowing month, and asking an already exhausted population to hunker down until this latest surge passed.

“There are many more people who are obeying the law, than not,” Shawn said. “But it’s still not enough.”
The New York Times