Via the Los Angeles Times, a litany of disaster: Coronavirus cases break records daily in California and L.A. Excerpt:
California and Los Angeles County continued to break COVID-19 pandemic records on a startling scale as much of the state was headed to a new stay-at-home order.
The deterioration is even worse than some of the projections released this week.
On Saturday, officials announced that Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would join several counties in the San Francisco Bay Area in implementing a new stay-at-home order beginning Sunday night, with hospitals’ available intensive care unit capacity reaching critically low levels.
L.A. County has broken single-day coronavirus case records in four of the last five days this week. On Saturday, at least 9,218 cases were reported, according to preliminary numbers compiled in The Times’ independent tally, exceeding a record set Friday, when 8,562 cases were reported. The single-day record was also broken Thursday, when 7,713 cases were reported.
The numbers mean that coronavirus cases in L.A. County are increasing at a pace that’s even more dire than what officials had forecast earlier in the week. On Tuesday, The Times reported that L.A. County officials projected the region would be seeing 9,000 cases a day by the middle to end of the week of Dec. 7. The county crossed that threshold Saturday.
L.A. County is now averaging nearly 7,000 new coronavirus cases a day over the last week — more than quadruple the pace from a month ago, when the county averaged about 1,500 new coronavirus cases a day in the week that ended Nov. 5.
With at least 43 new COVID-19 deaths recorded in Saturday, L.A. County is now averaging 38 deaths a day, a pace not seen since late July, during the region’s previous peak.
Cumulatively, L.A. County has reported more than 440,000 coronavirus cases and more than 7,880 deaths.
L.A. County hit its sixth consecutive daily record for COVID-19 hospitalizations with 2,855 people hospitalized in data released Saturday; that’s quadruple the number Oct. 17, when 722 people were in hospitals with coronavirus infections
Of those currently hospitalized in the county, 666 are in ICUs, a sum higher than at any point in the pandemic. L.A. County’s ICU numbers have tripled since Oct. 17, when 197 were in ICUs, and have hit new highs on the last three days.
