As the first of Orange County’s frontline healthcare workers received COVID-19 vaccinations on Wednesday, area hospitals continued to shatter coronavirus patient admittance records, prompting an unprecedented order preventing hospitals from diverting ambulances to other facilities.
O.C. health officials on Wednesday reported 1,486 patients hospitalized in the county with COVID-19. That includes 319 ICU patients, a startling increase of more than 100 people in just one day. Both are new records — a daily occurrence since last week.
The county also logged 3,231 new cases of COVID-19 Wednesday, bringing the cumulative case total to 111,168. Another 23 fatalities reported that day also raised the death toll to 1,718.
The county’s ICU bed availability dropped from 10.4% Tuesday to 9.5% in the unadjusted category, and slipped from 1.4% in the state’s adjusted metric down to zero. The adjusted metric was created to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients.
On Wednesday, Southern California’s percentage of available ICU beds was down to 0.5%.
Officials blame the recent surge on gatherings where people are not wearing face coverings.
Late Wednesday, Orange County Public Health Agency officials announced that so many hospitals were requesting ambulances be diverted to other facilities, sending ambulances elsewhere, sometimes 20 minutes away and they were running out of places to bring the patients to.
As a result, the county health agency said were halting the practice, for now.
Dr. Carl Schultz, the agency’s EMS medical director, said in a statement that hospital emergency rooms have become so overwhelmed due to the COVID surge that “almost all hospitals were going on diversion.”
“If nothing was done, ambulances would soon run out of hospitals that could take their patients,” Schultz said. “Therefore, we temporarily suspended ambulance diversion. While this will place some additional stress on hospitals, it will spread this over the entire county and help to mitigate the escalating concern of finding hospital destinations for ambulances.”
Schultz added: “To the best of our knowledge, this has never happened before.”
Many public health officials have made increasingly emotional requests that the public take this surge in new cases seriously. The steep rise comes just weeks after Thanksgiving, with Hannukah currently under way and Christmas and New Year’s fast approaching.
Dr. Paul Sheikewitz of Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange said it’s “been quite challenging” to meet the surge of patients.
“I think the greatest challenge is the burden of the number of patients that we see versus the number of staff that are able to take care of the patients,” Sheikewitz said.
Meanwhile, Orange County received its first shipment of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine Wednesday. About 25,000 doses were delivered.