And in keeping with my last comment, Gov Newsom is expected to lift regional safer-at-home orders today, and return California to the color-coded tier system.
Much of LA County is still at a fraction of 1% ICU bed capacity.
wtf
Two questions:
1. How long has CA been in this latest lockdown? Since November?
2. Can you give two cents as to why, after a month or two, there has been little to no improvement to ICU capacity?
Not trolling, not doubting, I just don't get it.
1 - First one was bout 2 weeks prior to Thanksgiving, and then there was a more strict one handed down in the first week of December. The idea was to issue the orders ahead of holiday travel periods, and that did not work as intended.
2 - Capacity is calculated by a formula that takes into account available beds, % of COVID patients in a region that are in ICU, and headcount to monitor those beds, and I'm sure a few other things like daily new cases. LA County has a little under 100 ICU beds open right now, but we show 0% capacity because nearly 70% of hospitalized COVID patients are in the ICU, and that knocks our effective capacity down by 20%. The two biggest impediments we're facing is explosive rates of transmission (we have neighborhoods in the city with daily caseloads that have been consistently over 4,000/100,000 since early December), and a lack of medical staff to man additional beds; it doesn't matter if you can triple bed count if you don't have anyone to monitor the patients. And because of that case count issue, we're just tapped out on staffing.