In Covid Surge, LA hospitals turn away ambulances and put patients in gift shops

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-29/l-a-county-hospitals-at-the-breaking-point-turn-away-ambulances

by belltaco • 6 years ago

104 183 6 years ago

msandford• 6 years ago

Super tragic for sure. Seems like something was screwed up because the goal was to flatten the curve below hospital capacity, not merely delay the spike until later. At this point it seems like LA will probably be another Italy or NYC.

Retric• 6 years ago

An extra 10+ months to gain experience and increase capacity made a huge difference in the 3rd spike. If this had happened 8 months ago things would have been vastly worse nationally.

Further, this is very much a flattened curve. We could have easily seen 2 or more times the current rates of infection back then.

avs7335• 6 years ago

Seems like something was screwed up because the goal was to flatten the curve below hospital capacity, not merely delay the spike until later.

Yes, people are screwed up.

You have antimask morons protesting grocery stores. [1]

The goal of flattening the curve was to flatten the curve...we never really did that. We gave it a shot until everyone got bored or were deemed essential or had a pre-existing condition of being poor.

[1] https://citizen.com/-MPkpO03IQfFeYb_MLWT

basicneo4• 6 years ago

How much has anti-mask protesters contributed to the surge? They got a lot of coverage in [social] media, but what's the marginal impact they have, given their frequency?

It's important to establish the actual significant causes of issues, so we now how to improve in future. Actions of those on opposing political sides would be a convenient and perhaps comforting significant cause, so we should be careful in prematurely concluding that.

sjg0076• 6 years ago

Because people refuse to social distance.

modzu4• 6 years ago

i live in canada, but this matches my experience in normal times... my brother had a bike accident and cracked his head off a car and we walked into a nearby hospital with blood running down his face, he was concussed such that he kept asking me where he parked.. and the triage nurse said, "just go home, unless you want to spend 3-4 hours waiting to see someone". we left. so the issue of hospital capacity seems to go way beyond covid, imo

philliphaydon• 6 years ago

I’m inclined to not believe your story, sorry, hospitals generally have a policy of someone bleeding from the head, or extensively, or serious injury, are bumped to the front of the queue over someone who is queuing for a sore stomach or checkup etc. So while you might have to wait, it shouldn’t be 3-4 hours, unless something like massive pile up happened and 25 people were rushed in, in critical condition.

StanislavPetrov• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter how acute your condition is if all the beds in the ER, hospital and/or ICU are full with COVID patients - there is simply nowhere to put you. Getting emergency treatment on a gurney in a hallway by hospital staff that is stretched thin and exhausted due to overwork isn't as good or effective as getting proper care.

Additionally, there are all sorts of treatments for chronic conditions, cancers and other maladies that take place in the hospital that are being delayed and/or cancelled due to lack of capacity.

modzu4• 6 years ago

lol! where are you from? its true my friend, ask any canadian they will have a similar story (at least in a city)

avs7335• 6 years ago

[deleting a frustrated and sarcastic comment I shouldn't have made]

gooseus2• 6 years ago

and instead decided on this? I do appreciate this over whatever comment you decided not to make, but still.

I would gladly pay up to $1 (or 100 upvotes) for every comment I make here if only to prevent the steady decline into Reddit-style self-indulgent noise.

THE_PUN_STOPS• 6 years ago

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mkl3• 6 years ago

For future reference, there's a "delete" link along with the "edit" one, in the two hour window, but you can't delete if the comment has replies. See https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editde...

avs7335• 6 years ago

Was going for transparency vis a vis an apology. Apparently another commenter took offense.

ck2• 6 years ago

If only we knew how to prevent this. Ten months ago.

olliej• 6 years ago

Depressingly avoidable, but too many people are too self interested to do what they should have been doing ten months ago.

Now we’ve got to where actual epidemiologists were warning: the overflow of COVID patients will start killing non-COVID patients through lack of care and ED resources.

treeman79• 6 years ago

I was dealing with a severe chronic issue at start of covid. Lost access to all my doctors. Avoided going to ER. Ended up having a small stroke. So yea. Lots of people suffering from general lack of care.

ashtonkem6• 6 years ago

Anecdotally, I noticed that private indoor parties started back up in ~August back when I lived in Santa Monica, and that mask compliance was pretty poor in the touristy areas. This was preventable, but I’m far from surprised sadly.

pstuart• 6 years ago

Most all of it was preventable, which is crazy making.

KMag• 6 years ago

Maybe I've been out of the US too long (spent my first 32 years in the Midwest / East Coast, out here in Hong Kong for 9 years now), but I don't understand why the public service announcements aren't just promoting it as incredibly rude beyond the pale to not take basic precautions.

I can understand why some people's first reaction is to dig in their heels when they're confronted with the state's power of coercion. But, here in Hong Kong, not covering your nose and mouth is seen as spit-on-a-baby-rude. Yea, we have a mask ordinance and I'm sure there's a law against spitting on babies, but 98% of people were wearing masks before the ordinances were passed. Part of it is fear and self preservation, remembering SARS from 2004, but a lot of it is basic manners. If you see someone spit on a baby, your first reaction isn't "hey, the state will punish you for that".

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, and we've had SARS-CoV2 here since January 2020, but the population of 7.5 million has fewer than 9,000 confirmed cases. It helps that at tropical temperatures, the virus survives only a few hours on stainless steel or non-porous plastic, but basic precautions, testing, and contact tracing really work.

Havoc• 6 years ago

Grim. London sounds like it’s heading for the same unfortunately

ashtonkem6• 6 years ago

Unclear. We’re not sure how dangerous the new strain that popped up in London is. Often viruses tend to get less lethal as they get more infectious, like the common cold. Certainly I’d still advise caution, but London might not be in terrible shape yet.

tayo42• 6 years ago

Isn't that because it's easier to transmit when the host doesn't die. Like a survival of the fittest thing. Covid isn't deadly enough to stop transmissions

thewarrior2• 6 years ago

Actually we’re pretty sure now. They did studies of the new strain based on contact tracing and it was found to have a 50 % greater chance of infecting contacts. It’s also in the US now.

jsnell• 6 years ago

The best evidence right now suggests that B.1.1.7 is significantly more trasmissible, but doesn't produce less (or more!) serious cases. (See the cohort matching study in this week's PHE report on the variant[0]). Maybe a statistically significant difference will emerge once we have more data, but at least for now it's better to not assume that.

But let's say for argument's sake that the new variant is indeed half as serious, while being 70% more transmissive. That gives you one single multiplicative change in hospital utilization, but a permanent change to the exponent of the epidemic growth curve. The multiplicative benefit will basically get nullified by the increased growth in a week or two, and after that it is all downside.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

erentz• 6 years ago

All early of course. But it doesn’t appear the new variant is more deadly, but also its not clear its less deadly yet either. Assuming it’s about the same severity as the current variant then that spells bad news. This thread here does a decent job explaining that https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/134356742510788198...

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

With mass testing, public awareness, social distancing, etc., I'm not sure if the virus getting less lethal will hold. We're certainly selecting for more virulent strains, though.

tomohawk2• 6 years ago

Factor out CA, and the US is doing fairly well.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...

All those measures that CA took that were lauded - they don't seem to be working as expected. The per capita rate in all other states is better, with only TN and AZ approaching CAs levels.

rconti• 6 years ago

The problem is, every few weeks there's a new "well, if you ignore this state, the US is doing really well" story.

CA is still only 34th/50 per capita in infections and 40th/50 per capita in deaths.

We can't exclude outliers and expect to get a useful dataset. Especially when those outliers change all the time, and exhibit the same patterns as each other.

tomohawk2• 6 years ago

According to the link I provided to the CDC, CA is at 95 per 100k, which is way more than any other state at this time.

bandana• 6 years ago

I see many other comments in this thread saying that this was preventable, how so ? Looks like California tried a lot of things (stay at own orders, business closures etc) and they are not in a better shape than more "relaxed" states.

raziel27013• 6 years ago

Cut people a check so that they could have afforded to stay inside in a bubble.

slg2• 6 years ago

A real national commitment to testing and contact tracing early on. A full lockdown which probably needed to be done at a national level since states can't restrict travel. Pay everyone to stay home.

I simply don't get the "we couldn't have done anything" mindset when we see countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand with deaths per capita as little as 1%-3% of what it is here.

thethirdone2• 6 years ago

CA recently is in a wave; the color from the linked page is about the new cases / capita in the last 7 days. Overall CA is doing better than the median state.

s5300• 6 years ago

You did a good job including the fact that some of the states that are slighty better per capita are also states that just so happen to have officials raiding the homes of people trying to ensure accurate data is transparently posted.

Also the fact that some of said states are near entirely run by people who have claimed that the virus did not exist from the start. I wonder how that may affect the transparency of data we get to see...

Oops, I mean, cognitive dissonance is cool.

creata• 6 years ago

This is statistics at its worst. How can you conclude from just the last seven days that "those measures that CA took... don't seem to be working as expected"?

dragonwriter5• 6 years ago

All those measures that CA took that were lauded - they don't seem to be working as expected

Yes, they did.

And then the subsequent widespread public rebellion by county sheriffs, who lean very strongly to the political right and to whom state law invests exclusive and largely discretionary authority for enforcement of public health orders, that they simply would not enforce any of the orders also worked exactly as expected.

National media has tended to cover the state and regional public health orders, but not so much the very public announcements of non-enforcement by sheriffs. But they are extremely well distributed by local traditional and social media, and effect behavior.

alacombe4• 6 years ago

Yes, they did.

Do you have a relevant study backing this assertion ? At best, we'll have a good understanding of effectiveness 10 to 15 years from now.

axaxs2• 6 years ago

Not to sound grim, but I now wonder if it would have been best to let things be. Of course inform the public, but enforce no action. Would/could it have led to a huge overwhelming initial spike that has died down months ago? It feels now that we've been in various states of lock down for a year and reached the same result, unfortunately.

nharada• 6 years ago

I don't know, the other side of that argument is imagine how much worse it could have been if we'd done nothing.

proverbialbunny2• 6 years ago

The problem is in the US hospitals get overloaded quite easily. Our healthcare is not as robust as Sweden's, so that option hasn't been able to be on the table.

Keep in mind the surge we are seeing right now is from Thanksgiving. It is most likely going to get worse.

jussij• 6 years ago

While Sweden did adopt the 'do nothing' approach, their results so far have hardly been a success story.

Currently Swedish deaths sit at 837 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden

By comparison consider Sweden's neighbors.

Norway currently sits at 80 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/norway

Finland currently sits at 99 deaths per million: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland

What is more troubling for Sweden is their current daily death rate is also very much higher than both Norway and Finland.

So if the aim was to try an reduce the number of citizens dying from Covid 19 then based on those figures Sweden's 'do nothing' approach has failed.

raziel27013• 6 years ago

Wait you're wondering if not taking any action would have had the same result? Or masks on but no social distance? Or both social distance and masks on? Because social distance will preclude many activities.

But in any case, in my opinion more should have been done, not less. Specifically, cut people a check so that they can afford to stay safely inside.

AlexDragusin• 6 years ago

I think he is suggesting there would be a strong information campaign about masks, social distancing, hand washing etc then leave people be while moving on with the vaccines and so forth.

On the other hand, if all the people would followed the restrictions to the letter it would been under control many times over, as demonstrated by NZ, TW, AU, CN.

axaxs2• 6 years ago

I mean, the govt can make recommendations and let people decide what to do. I'm -not- an antimasker...and haven't left the house much since March. But it feels like our people will inevitably decide it's boring and give up, as I've seen not only in news but in my friend group. So it feels like we just delayed mass infection rather than preventing it.

belltaco3• 6 years ago

I think they were doing a thought experiment where you'd let it run wild in the beginning, and let people see the horrors of that, and let that fear be the motivating factor. Arguably fewer deaths could have come out of that strategy, because the anti-maskers and political covid minimizer have successfully spread the misinformation of "it's just a flu, very few deaths" etc. discounting the fact that the fewer deaths were happening coz of masks and lockdowns.

YarickR2• 6 years ago

They do not want to stay inside, and that is the problem. In the small town I live now not far from LA, most restaurants are closed for indoor, as well as outdoor dining, but several places just refuse to obey this order . What do you think is happening ? They are packed to the brim, with lines waiting to get in and have their beer and fried wings their usual way. No need to say local community is split between outraged "conscious" citizens demanding managers' heads on a plate, and "freedom lovers" demanding first group mind their own business and stay the fsck out of others' way to have their regular fun. I'm watching this hitshow with both amusement and fright .

krona• 6 years ago

It's debatable whether we'd be dealing with multiple significantly more transmissible strains of the virus if we hadn't amplified the evolutionary pressures (and time scales) necessary for it to happen.

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

We've only eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, so we have almost no experience doing something like this. It was also crazy to think that short-term containment measures (masks and social distancing) wouldn't start selecting strains that are more virulent.

The good news is that vaccine distribution is moving very quickly--hopefully faster than the virus can mutate. The bad news is only developed countries, India, and China will likely vaccinate that quickly.

sjg0076• 6 years ago

Fatalism ain’t the correct response.

bsder5• 6 years ago

Would/could it have led to a huge overwhelming initial spike that has died down months ago?

Highly doubtful. And you would have crushed your healthcare workers.

Even if everything we did just delayed the big spike until now, it's a HUGE win that healthcare workers are now getting vaccinated.

noobermin• 6 years ago

You are seeing a fraction of what would have happened if you just "let things be."

adjkant• 6 years ago

When hospitals hit capacity, the death rate dramatically spikes. Take a look at early NYC data to see how hospital overload affects this. Letting things be would have been true disaster.

Because we took steps, this is not going to reach anywhere close to the same result in terms of deaths, even if it comes to equal cases. The solution to the time problem was more strict action earlier, ironically for most on the "economy" side of pandemic action. Give people a big stimulus, stop all jobs beyond food and true essentials, and enforce strict contract tracing. We might have been out of this in two months if we did that.

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

The early NYC numbers came from a variety of situations:

1) Gov Cuomo sending elderly to nursing homes and packing them in for treatment. This killed thousands (same with Gov Whitmer in Michigan) and yet Cuomo wrote a fucking book about how great he is instead of facing any consequences.

2) Overuse of ventilators. People were putting vents right as they came in, mostly based off bad advice from doctors in Europe. Turned out this was a death sentence. Most of the young people who died, most likely died from high pressure ventilators over anything else.

3) Overflow hospitals in NYC were entirely empty because they were intended for non-covid patients and were incredibly difficult to get into. Many people who didn't have COVID, who were kept for monitoring, were kept on COVID floors of regular hospitals and got COVID.

NYC was mismanagement at every possible level.

Afforess• 6 years ago

This is an incorrect take, and deeply frustrating that it is so pervasive, given that there is literal evidence of it being wrong. China, especially Wuhan, was the center of the virus outbreak early in 2020. China successfully locked down and stopped the spread of the virus. Today, Wuhan and China in general has no community spread of Covid. So there is clearly a solution, even with out a vaccine.

Our political leadership was too weak to make the decisions necessary to implement these solutions. Some readers may retort that lockdowns are a violation of democratic or constitutional freedoms, but there have been times in the past when these rights were suspended. During the civil war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed people without a trial. In extreme situations, extreme actions may be warranted. (The US will soon have more Covid deaths than US soldiers died in all of WW2, if you think my war comparison is unfair). China took extreme actions to enforce lockdowns and successfully ended the spread of Covid. America's leadership decided that peoples lives did not matter, and did not.

Ultimately, I will be significantly more suspicious of any western politician who demands we go to war to protect lives, or give up liberties for personal safety. 2020 has shown that politicians would not take even the weakest measures to protect personal safety (e.g mask mandates) - exposing their lies in other domains as well. The war on terror was fiction. The war on drugs is a jobs program. And a 9/11 amount of deaths can happen every day and politicians will literally do nothing and people will demand nothing. I am deeply pessimistic about our future.

grumple• 6 years ago

It’s not just that the political leadership was lacking; our media and the people of the US also collaborated in this failure. There is no sense of community or duty amongst our people, only selfishness.

ryandrake3• 6 years ago

The "stay at home orders" in the USA were so unenforced, they were jokes. Politicians wanted to seem like they were doing something so they rolled their eyes and enacted these half-assed "orders", making sure to forget to have the police enforce them. In CA, our brilliant governor told everyone to wear masks and avoid restaurants, then went out and had a fun maskless restaurant outing himself.

Most people I know took stay-at-home seriously, but enough people didn't that it was totally ineffectual.

AlexandrB• 6 years ago

Brutal that this idea keeps surfacing on Hacker News contrary to the advice of almost all epidemiologists out there. It seems like utter hubris to assume you know something they don't.

latch• 6 years ago

Nothing new here. Hacker News (and more generally a lot of people in tech) are pretty sure they have the solution to: debt, famine, equality, global warming, etc.

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

There's also been hubris from epidemiologists because they're not politicians, economists, or experts in human behavior, and this very much isn't just a problem of a virus spreading.

cmurf4• 6 years ago

Already people are dying of non-COVID disease due to lack of capacity. Is that a fair trade off? We can directly connect the dots from "I wanna do what I want!" who then get sick or make other people sick who then end up at a hospital who take up a bed and someone else who isn't sick but has a plumonary or cardiac episode dies.

If we had perfect information, we could trace the liability back to people's behavior and fine them properly for non-compliance. But that would run up against privacy concerns wouldn't it?

What about a general strike by health care workers and grocery stockers and food delivery service workers? Right now. In the middle of a pandemic. Can you imagine the outrage? And why would people be outraged? Because they think these workers are slaves. They shouldn't have a choice. It's everyone who isn't on the front line who should get to choose whether to comply with public health orders.

It is certainly more civilized for health care workers to just quit en masse right now, than to propose people should just get to flaunt public health orders without any kind of penalty. But I'm getting the strong indication this is not a civil society.

blaisio2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for here, but if we had allowed a huge initial spike, many hundreds of thousands would have died needlessly. We are still doing much better than that.

throwaway9980• 6 years ago

Sure, maybe, and we could spin out dozens of scenarios and approaches that could have been better or worse.

I think one phrase from your comment highlights the entire problem though: “enforce no action.”

You can’t enforce a society wide shutdown. You can only get that from citizens who voluntarily participate in a social order that they trust. We (Americans) are faced with enormous problems as a society as a result of our inability to trust one another.

We may be able to engineer a zero trust replacement for our monetary system. We seem to desire the same thing for our society. Everyone demands infinite verification of everything. Fact check the fact checkers and audit the auditors that audit the election results! At some point though, it’s turtles all the way down. Political debate is starting to sound like epistemology.

It appears that societies that have greater levels of trust are faring better in this pandemic. That cannot become an excuse for our failure. It should instruct us on how to proceed.

EDIT: re-reading this I realize I’m singling out “society wide shutdown” as the sort of imagined best response, maybe it is, but what I was really thinking of was “highly coordinated society wide response where everyone does what they are supposed to based on their role.”

dwd• 6 years ago

As in Sweden?

You can simply compare them to Denmark, Norway and Finland on infection rates, death toll and economic impact. If those countries manage to immunise their populations quickly then Sweden's approach was a huge failure in comparison.

But more to the point Sweden has now started trying to mandate restrictions and lockdowns as their health system is struggling and relying on public goodwill to do the right thing just isn't enough.

diogenescynic2• 6 years ago

And there are still idiots refusing to wear masks in public spaces like grocery stores and gas stations. Saw multiple occurrences over the weekend.

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

gas stations

In the convenience store or at the pump? If it's just at the pump, a lot of stations let you pay by card at the pump, it's outdoors, it's pretty easy to stay six feet from someone, and you're there less than 15 minutes.

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

I wonder how much was done to increase surge ER capacity between May and November. The was obviously a possibility, there were a lot of warnings about holiday gatherings.

Hopefully hospitals are preparing for the surge in a few weeks, but I have a feeling they're too busy with the current surge.

CydeWeys5• 6 years ago

They simply don't have enough doctors and nurses. You can't train up the kind of people needed here over a summer.

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

We'll obviously give nurses more patients, though a nurses' group is pushing back.

https://www.abc10.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/califo...

I wonder if we could have trained covid medics over three months.

vimy• 6 years ago

Apparently the WHO is looking into ivermectin and might recommend it as a prophylaxis and cure in January.

https://c19ivermectin.com/

https://reddit.com/r/ivermectin

Edit: Why are people downvoting? The studies and experiences of patients are very promising. There are 25 studies on Ivermectin vs. COVID-19

• 12 of them peer-reviewed and published in international journals

• 9 are randomized controlled trials

• 4 are randomized placebo-controlled double-blind trials totaling 640 patients

• Total number of patients treated with ivermectin in these studies: 6359

• Total number of patients treated without ivermectin in these studies: 8594

SOLAR_FIELDS• 6 years ago

Dr. Paul Marik, who has treated thousands of acute COVID patients, had been highly recommending Ivermectin as a first line treatment since about early November (see page 3): https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_...

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

I agree. There have been many doctors across the US who have been using ivermectin or inhaled steroids with incredible success rates. Meanwhile controlled trails for using it have slowed to a halt (we've been waiting since August) while The Gavi Alliance and gates are promoting an mRNA vaccine of a type that has never been approved or deployed before.

It's a clear money grab too. They want this vaccine out because it opens the door to a ton of other mRNA treatments they haven't been able to get approved.

option5• 6 years ago

CA has had stricter lockdowns than most other states since the very beginning. Now our per capita rate is worse than Florida.

I think CA has many counterproductive restrictions. For example, outdoor dining should’ve been open which could, in theory, prevent people from gathering inside.

[*] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100k...

redisman2• 6 years ago

Why is CA doing so poorly? Is it just bigger cities? OR and WA seem to be doing relatively well

option5• 6 years ago

too many stupid restrictions just made people fed up and ignore most if not all of them.

Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I was shocked to learn that many of my friends had inside guests for holidays. This is instead of going camping by themselves (banned) or going skiing by themselves (banned too). Even outdoor dining is banned - all you can do is gather inside now.

bsder5• 6 years ago

Why is CA doing so poorly?

A lot of people who can't afford to stay home combined with a bunch of numbnuts who decided to go visit family over Thanksgiving.

This isn't even the Christmas burst yet. It's about to get worse.

gedy• 6 years ago

Some guesswork here, but looking at the percentages in SoCal the hispanic percentage of COVID cases is much higher[0] and perhaps a driver for the bigger numbers (whatever the root cause).

[0] https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hhsa/programs...

dehrmann10• 6 years ago

I'll pick on the curfew for outdoor dining. It was a restriction that was added in November. It did nothing, and could have made things worse by having people gathered in a shorter time window. I'm not sure if that's the case, but there wasn't any evidence suggesting it would help, either.

option5• 6 years ago

what is crystal clear about this virus now is that gathering with others inside is very bad.

Outdoor dining is not ideal, but could have prevented many indoor gatherings. Remember how CA was closing the beaches in the spring despite that clearly being stupid?

thethirdone2• 6 years ago

Now our per capita rate is worse than Florida.

Total infections / capita is still lower in CA than in Florida.

option5• 6 years ago

CDC link above paints a different picture

J253• 6 years ago

The San Mateo County Health Officer recently published a statement that rhetorically asked this and other similar questions about CA, and I suppose human behavior and response to various types of SAH orders and the like. It was a very well-written piece and was featured here on HN 3 weeks ago[0]. Here’s a direct link[1]. I highly recommend reading to get an honest perspective from someone who has to make these kinds of decisions at the county level.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341289 [1] https://www.smchealth.org/health-officer-updates/december-7-...

testplzignore• 6 years ago

I've seen the "gift shop" thing reported by various sources today, but haven't found the origin of it. Doesn't pass the smell test to me. The logistics of gutting a gift shop and converting it to a treatment area seem non-trivial. Maybe it's just being used as a triage waiting room? Does anyone have any details on this?

throwaway829• 6 years ago

placing patients in conference rooms and gift shops

If there's any truth to it, I can imagine the hospital's snack/convenience shop is being used. So it's not a neighborhood gift shop but some room in the hospital that sells a branded keychain. Definitely a click-baity title though.

djsumdog4• 6 years ago

Yea, there are lots of aspects to this article that have the same feel of the article that made it to the top of HN news a few weeks back about a nurse who claimed her patients denied COIVD was real as they were dying. The Wired article that dug deeper into that story, showing the glaring holes in it, didn't get as much attention:

https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...

There are no indications in this story where the capacity is coming from. What percentage of people are in the ICU for other conditions (heart attacks, car crashes, delaying treatment for conditions they needed surgery for months ago) vs infections? What are the percentage for flu, strep and other serious infections vs COVID? There's a lot missing in this article.

bagels• 6 years ago

Really interesting article. I find it curious that they didn't get a statement from Doering though.

belltaco3• 6 years ago

From ABC News.

The CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, separately said patients there have spilled over into the gift shop and five tents outside the emergency department.

mkl3• 6 years ago

That sentence appears many places. The earliest I can find is 22 December: https://ktla.com/news/california/california-health-system-bu...

lobster45• 6 years ago

This hospital is notorious for terrible conditions, many years prior to the pandemic

listless2• 6 years ago

Why did they not extend capacity with field hospitals weeks ago? They’ve been telling us it was going to get bad, then it did and they’re not prepared for it? What is going on here?

dhnajsjdnd• 6 years ago

There are tent hospitals in the parking lots. It seems like they have been trying.

dangero• 6 years ago

This is a really good question —- earlier this year we had setup unused overflow facilities and those were taken down. Why were they dismantled?

CydeWeys5• 6 years ago

They weren't ultimately needed then and you couldn't staff them now that the pandemic is countrywide rather than restricted to NYC. The real limiting factor here is availability of trained medical personnel and there is no surplus of them anywhere.

dragonwriter5• 6 years ago

earlier this year we had setup unused overflow facilities and those were taken down.

No, they mostly weren't.

Why were they dismantled?

They have largely been activated, including ones which while prepared stood empty in the initial, far lower, peak, and many additional ones were set up for this surge.

diogenescynic2• 6 years ago

Most hospitals are maxed out and nurses are quitting and calling out. We just don’t have resources to fall on, the bench isn’t that deep.

dragontamer2• 6 years ago

When cases grow exponentially, no amount of preparation will be sufficient.

alacombe4• 6 years ago

That's bullshit, China grew hospitals in a matter of weeks. Though, they are not restricted with all the regulations going on the US.

longdefeat• 6 years ago

From what I understand, space isn't the only limiting issue. You might find more space with some difficulty but you cannot suddenly produce more nurses and doctors, many of whom are overwhelmed or themselves ill and out of commission.

blaisio2• 6 years ago

Yeah space really isn't the problem at all. It is nurses and doctors and oxygen. They have nurses - who are supposed to treat 2, maybe 3 at a time - treating 30 people at a time.

listless2• 6 years ago

That makes sense, but then I think about the military. Don’t they have a massive medical force? They are not _all_ doctors and nurses (although many are) but all are highly trained and could serve here. Why not deploy them to the current battlefield?

bsder5• 6 years ago

ICU patients require a significant amount of highly-trained personnel 24/7. You quickly burn through those people.

And, since the Federal government never stepped up to fund anything, no one is going to bother training personnel that they'll just get rid of in 12 months.

unishark• 6 years ago

What do you mean? There's been a bunch of emergency funding bills passed.

ashtonkem6• 6 years ago

And, since the Federal government never stepped up to fund anything

I'm not sure where this idea came from, but I really wish people would start arguing about what Congress actually did rather than making it up, because Congress did step up to fund medical care. The CARES act appropriated $130B for health care providers, including hospitals. The followup appropriations bill allocates $69B for vaccines, testing, health care providers, and mental health.

One might argue that that's not enough money, but at least make the argument that they should have spent more rather than falsely claiming they spent nothing. Congress' direct payments to the healthcare providers in these two bills totaled $199B. Broken down by department, only two agencies are allocated more than $199B next year, the DOD ($695B) and the VA ($243B). And that's just looking at direct payments to medical providers, I didn't even mention the remaining $2.1T from the CARES act.

jpollock• 6 years ago

With these growth rates (doubling every 10-15 days), _doubling_ the number of beds available in an area will only buy two weeks.

Santa Clara's hospitalization growth rate is running at 2-3 weeks.

This isn't something the health system can grow to solve.

dragonwriter5• 6 years ago

Why did they not extend capacity with field hospitals weeks ago?

They...did. There is a limit to the ability to magic up staffed medical facilities on short notice ex nihilo, however.

They’ve been telling us it was going to get bad, then it did and they’re not prepared for it?

Had it not been predicted that it would exceed the potential to boost capacity, they would not have implemented the capacity-cobtingent statewide stay at home order (which is undermined by county sheriffs widespread and public non-enforcement stance.)

labster• 6 years ago

I live near a hospital. At least they’ve stopped running the sirens all the time; there’s no point in rushing to the hospital when the ambulance will have to wait for hours anyway. It was getting pretty annoying on Christmas Day, no traffic noise save for the parade of ambulances.

It’s sad that so many people are dying, but that’s the price of not living in an authoritarian mask state where humans care about each other’s survival.

cmurf4• 6 years ago

We make people cover up their butt holes to go into the grocery store. I don't see why some people get all neurologically bent out of shape over covering up their pie holes.

In Covid Surge, LA hospitals turn away ambulances and put patients in gift shops

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