Coronavirus hospitalizations surge to unprecedented level as L.A. announces stay-at-home rules
LA TimesEMT Giselle Dorgalli, second from right, looks at a monitor while performing chest compression on a patient who tested positive for coronavirus in the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles. “What matters is a hospital’s practical ability to take care of the patients that come in the door, and that requires not just a bed but, more importantly, it requires people, it requires staff, it requires supplies and equipment,” Dr. Christina Ghaly, L.A. County’s director of health services, said during a briefing. “Hospitals will have to take substantive action to meet the need for hospital and, particularly, for ICU level of care.” Despite the distressing statistics, the prospect of even more restrictions — which Newsom said could include some form of new stay-at-home order for areas in the strictest purple tier of the state’s coronavirus reopening road map — will be a tough sell for pandemic-battered businesses and rule-weary Californians. Ferrer said that, given the efficacy of some basic infection prevention measures like widespread masking and physical distancing, that the county’s latest regulations attempt to “limit places where people were intermingling with others that weren’t in their households, to limit the capacity at those places so there wouldn’t be a lot of crowding.” “That’s very different than what we did months ago when we actually closed all of nonessential retail, all of nonessential business because we didn’t really have the tools we have now,” she said. “We’re seeing terrifying increases in numbers in L.A. County that can only be turned around if everyone, businesses and individuals, carefully use the tools we have to slow the spread,” Ferrer said.