Name: Stay-at-home order extended for Southern California
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Stay-at-home order extended for Southern California

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By | | Orange County RegisterSouthern California’s troubling outlook for intensive care capacity has prompted state health officials to keep the region’s stay-at-home order in place, officials said Tuesday, Dec. 29.That means indoor spaces at restaurants, fitness centers and many other businesses and public sectors will need to stay closed in the state’s most populous region.New four-week projections that weigh current ICU capacity and admissions, as well as other coronavirus tracking metrics such as case and transmission rates, will decide going forward when the stricter stay-at-home order can be lifted.If the projections – to be updated each day – show a region’s availability of adult ICU beds will be greater than 15% over the next month, it will be released from the order, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said during a news conference Tuesday.The adjusted ICU capacity levels in the Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley regions remained at 0% as of Tuesday – both regions bottomed out nearly two weeks ago – though Ghaly reminded the public that the .“We essentially are projecting that the ICU capacity is not improving in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley and that demand will continue to exceed capacity,” Ghaly said.It was unclear whether state officials were also giving in Tuesday’s press conference that month-out projection the decides how long a region must remain under the stricter orders.The rate of new COVID-19 cases, too, is being used to anticipate demand for hospital beds – Southern California is seeing about 130 new positive tests each day for every 100,000 residents right now.“We know that those cases are going to end up in the hospital, 10 to 12 days later, at a rate of about 12%,” Ghaly said.The state’s four-tier, color-coded system has been less important to state health officials in recent weeks as for “widespread” coronavirus risk.Southern California&nbsp;&nbsp;because adult ICU bed availability among the 11-county region’s hospitals fell below a 15% limit set by state health officials.“You can certainly stretch many rubber bands pretty far as we are stretching many of our hospitals pretty far,” Ghaly said. “But we know that that stretch has a limit before it breaks.”In Southern California, hospitals are running out of staff, are having to use all their rooms and are experiencing much longer than normal wait times in emergency rooms.Hospitals that normally run independently of each other now are obligated to each other to absorb new patients and share resources, particularly if smaller facilities have to switch to an all-hands “crisis care” status, Ghaly said.There are some signs that increases in COVID-19 cases statewide are leveling off, Ghaly said, but another wave is expected to hit hospitals in the next couple of weeks.“We certainly anticipate that the middle of January is going to be a pretty difficult time in our hospitals, where the cases from this week and next week really start to stack on top of one another, impacting the emergency rooms, our hospital wards and our ICU spaces,” he said.Southern California’s hospitals have been the state government’s biggest focus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday, noting that almost every hospital in Los Angeles County on Saturday diverted ambulances because they already had too many people awaiting beds.A torrent of coronavirus patients at hospitals also burdens routine emergency room care, he said, meaning longer waits for other acute patients – people who have been in a car accident or have had a heart attack or stroke.The governor said a new state team will be embedded in Los Angeles County to encourage “load leveling,” or shifting patients from overfilled hospitals to neighbors that still have room.We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. We reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.Get the latest news delivered daily!Follow UsMost PopularClose

By | | Orange County RegisterSouthern California’s troubling outlook for intensive care capacity has prompted state health officials to keep the region’s stay-at-home order in place, officials said Tuesday, Dec. 29.That means indoor spaces at restaurants, fitness centers and many other businesses and public sectors will need to stay closed in the state’s most populous region.New four-week projections that weigh current ICU capacity and admissions, as well as other coronavirus tracking metrics such as case and transmission rates, will decide going forward when the stricter stay-at-home order...

Stay-at-home order extended for Southern California

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