The news out of Southern California keeps getting worse. Via The Los Angeles Times: L.A. doctor overwhelmed by intensely sick COVID-19 patients. Excerpt:
Many Californians spent New Year’s Eve in a safe place with immediate family. Dr. Nick Kwan, the assistant medical director of emergency services at Alhambra Hospital in Los Angeles County, spent it with a COVID-19 patient who went into code blue — cardiac or respiratory arrest — five separate times.
Code blue requires the medical staff to summon a quick and intense response to resuscitate the patient.
“It’s mentally, physically and emotionally draining,” said Kwan, who struggled to articulate the toll that a monthlong surge of COVID-19 patients is placing on his and other hospitals across Los Angeles County.
“This is a full-on Category 10. ... It’s literally World War III,” he said.
“It’s not the volume of patients,” he said. “It’s the intensity and sickness of the patients. I’ve never thought some of these numbers are compatible with life, with patients coming in sicker than you can imagine.”
Across L.A. County and much of Southern California, hospitals are struggling with an influx of intensely sick COVID-19 patients and a lack of resources, including staff and vital infrastructure, such as oxygen piping.
On Friday, the state summoned the U.S. Army Corps to help six hospitals dealing with severe challenges supplying oxygen to patients who needed it.
Alhambra Hospital was not among those, but it nonetheless was stretched thin by COVID-19 and the emotional toll it placed on all involved.
“I don’t think a lot of people outside are seeing what we are seeing,” Kwan said. “It’s hard until you are in there, until your family and loved ones are in there.”
Since Thanksgiving, the 144-bed hospital that serves as a melting pot of the San Gabriel Valley, many of whose residents are first- and second-generation Latino and Asian immigrants, has seen a steady wave of patients with difficulty breathing.
Kwan said that besides Alhambra, he knows several other hospitals along the 210 Freeway corridor are full and straining under the burdens of the present surge.
The waiting room at Alhambra Hospital is now a COVID ward. Regular beds have been quickly converted to ICU beds. And ambulances wait outside with arriving patients because “physically we can’t accommodate the patient” at that time, Kwan said. “It’s across the board. The virus doesn’t care who you are. You can be sick, healthy, young, old.”
