Orange County continued its record-setting pace for COVID-19 hospitalizations, reporting 2,236 coronavirus patients in county hospitals Tuesday, up from 2,178 a day earlier.
The number of patients in intensive care also increased from 500 to 504.
County officials also reported 1,376 new diagnoses of coronavirus, raising the cumulative total to 171,955.
There were no new fatalities reported Tuesday, leaving the death toll at 1,926. There have been 25 fatalities reported this week. The death reports come from a variety of sources, so they are staggered.
Last week, the county reported 56 COVID-19 fatalities, down from 85 the week before.
Orange County CEO Frank Kim said hospital officials have told him they were “concerned obviously” about the surge of patients, but, added, “They seem like they were managing it.”
Kim said testing demand is down, which could be a reflection of residents returning home for the holidays and not having time to get tested. Also, Kim added, some cities that were testing residents ceased doing so when their federal funding for it dried up.
There were 17,427 tests reported on Tuesday, raising the cumulative to 2,127,740, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.
“The only thing I care about now is getting as much vaccine as possible and getting as many people inoculated as possible,” Kim said.
Larger regional hospital systems received vaccines directly from the state, but the county was put in charge of delivering the medicine to smaller, stand-alone hospitals, Kim said.
County officials are working on a plan to help all hospitals vaccinate residents because medical workers are “swamped” with caring for patients, he said.
“We’re all in this together,” Kim said. “Whether it’s hospitals doing it or we’re doing it, it doesn’t matter. The county will step up.”
County officials are eying large sites such as school gyms or parking lots to be central vaccination locations.
“We want to do thousands” of inoculations a day, Kim said.
One issue, however, is finding enough qualified medical workers to vaccinate residents, Kim said. Only nurses, doctors and paramedics are authorized, but discussions are ongoing about expanding the types of qualified medical workers to provide vaccinations, he added.
The Orange County Jail’s recent outbreak continues to rise with an increase from 1,097 infected inmates as of Monday to 1,154 inmates infected on Tuesday.
Authorities are awaiting the results of 202 more tests and five inmates are hospitalized, according to Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Breckner.
The Coroner Division of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department is now accepting bodies of COVID-19 victims from hospitals because the area’s mortuaries and funeral homes are too full, Breckner said.
The outbreak has affected legal proceedings at the county’s courthouses, including the preliminary hearing in a murder conspiracy case involving alleged Orange County Mexican Mafia chief Johnny Martinez, which was put on hold when a co-defendant tested positive for coronavirus. One of Martinez’s attorneys, Richard Herman, said Martinez has also tested positive for COVID-19.
On Tuesday, the preliminary hearing was continued until Jan. 19 because three of the defendants are being quarantined. Four of the five have been infected with the virus.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Peter Wilson, who is overseeing a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the county seeking to reduce the jail population to better conform with physical distancing guidelines, has ordered Sheriff Don Barnes to provide details of each inmate’s charges, criminal history, and medical status by noon Thursday.
Wilson also allowed Santa Ana to intervene in the lawsuit. A hearing is scheduled Friday to go over Wilson’s order to reduce the jail population by half, with Barnes claiming he has released as many lower-risk inmates as he possibly can.
Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine associate professor of population health and disease prevention, predicted the county will rack up more than 3,000 deaths before the pandemic is done.
“We’ll have well over 3,000 deaths when this is done,” he said. “How much more is hard to say.”
Noymer said it is possible that COVID-19 is spreading so quickly because of a new, much more contagious variant first seen in England that has reached Southern California.
“California is very connected to the world so we get these things early,” Noymer said.
Whether the variant is widespread here “is hard to know for sure,” Noymer said. “But it’s certainly possible.”
The county is struggling with a surge fueled by Thanksgiving-related family and friend gatherings. Another surge related to Christmas and New Year’s celebrations is expected soon.
The county’s state-adjusted ICU bed availability remains at zero, and the unadjusted figure dropped from 6% Monday to 4.9% Tuesday. The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients.
The Southern California region is at zero ICU capacity.
The county’s availability of ventilators dropped from 33% Monday to 31% Tuesday.
All of the county’s metrics continue to remain within the state’s most-restrictive, purple tier of the four-tier coronavirus monitoring system.
Orange County’s adjusted daily case rate per 100,000 — released on Tuesdays — increased to 67.8 from 53.5 last week. The positivity rate rose from 16.9% to 17.1%.
The county’s Health Equity Quartile Positivity Rate, which measures the cases in highly affected, needier parts of the county, decreased from 24.2% last week to 23.4%.
Outbreaks at the county’s skilled nursing facilities and elderly assisted living facilities — defined as two or more cases within 14 days — are an ongoing problem for the county. The county has seen 43 outbreaks at skilled nursing facilities and at 56 elderly assisted living facilities.
On Monday, Orange County officials again suspended ambulance diversions.
“After allowing ambulance diversion… for more than a week, the previously described metrics that measure hospital capacity to receive ambulances from the field have again deteriorated,” according to a memo from the county’s Emergency Medical Services Director Dr. Carl Schultz.
As of Sunday, 90% of paramedics were averaging 62 minutes of waiting at hospitals to drop off patients, according to the memo.