LOS ANGELES, CBSLA – The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 10,392 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 274 deaths on Wednesday, the highest one-day mortality rate since the start of the pandemic.
People are queuing up at Lincoln Park on the 30th. December 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Getty Images)
To date, there have been 756,116 cases of coronavirus and 10,056 deaths from the disease in Los Angeles County.
Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the province’s health department, said that the province currently has an average of 150 new deaths per day from VIDOC-19, which is almost equal to the average number of people dying every day from all other causes in the province.
The heartbreaking thing is that many of these deaths would not have happened if we had done a better job of reducing transmission, she said.
Due to the high number of deaths, Supervisor Hilda Solis says the California National Guard was called in to assist the overstretched coroner’s office in its management and administrative tasks.
Our coroner takes bodies from hospitals where there’s no place to store them, she says. And I understand the coroner will be assisted in his operations by the California National Guard, and we expect them to be here next Monday. It’s a grim reality, but I have to say this because we’ve come to the point where we have to show the real results of what this virus has taken and can take.
According to the latest state data, 7,546 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in Los Angeles County. Approximately 20% was treated in intensive care and 18% on ventilators.
Of those who died on Wednesday, 95 were older than 80, 99 were between 65 and 79, 44 were between 50 and 64, 11 were between 30 and 49, and one was between 18 and 29.
The high number of deaths, again, is partly due to a delay in the release of spectrum eclipse reports that occurred on Christmas Day and a delay in the release of reports due to the holidays, officials said.
Also on Wednesday, Janice Hahn, the Supervisor of the Province of Los Angeles, addressed the state and requested that the USNS Mercy hospital ship be returned to the province.
And when I heard words like rationing and triage in our hospitals, I knew we were in trouble.
Although the ship cannot accommodate COVID-19 patients, Khan said the 1,000 hospital beds and additional medical staff could help ease the burden on the local health care system.
Health officials also said a new option had not yet been found in Los Angeles County, although Governor Gavin Newsom had previously said it had been found in Southern California.
That doesn’t mean the option isn’t floating in Los Angeles County, Ferrer said. Thousands and thousands of people are tested every day, and we can only take a small number of these results and determine the sequence of genes.
This means that at this stage we have not yet found this variant in the first series of samples, she continues. Reminder: Whether or not that possibility exists here in the province does not change the need for all of us to use the strategies we currently have to limit the impact and spread of the virus.
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