Hospitals overwhelmed and bodies loaded into semi-trailers as California reaches breaking point with COVID-19
The state of California has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
On New Year’s Eve, 585 COVID-19 deaths were reported in the state, making up more than one seventh of all deaths from the virus reported in the United States that day. More than 2.4 million people, in a state of 39 million, have been infected, with nearly 39,000 more diagnosed Sunday.
In Los Angeles, San Diego, and the entirety of Southern and Central Valley California, hospital intensive care units have entirely run out of space. On January 1, there were over 20,000 people hospitalized throughout the state, by comparison at the height of the spike on July 8 only 8000 were hospitalized.
The flood of coronavirus cases has exposed the underfunded, unprepared health care system in the richest state in the country. The Los Angeles Times reports that “hospitals are scrambling to find staff” and that there is a “chronic shortage of oxygen tanks.” The paper quoted Christina Ghaly, the Los Angeles County director of health services, who described non-COVID outpatient services as down to a “skeleton crew.” She said the county was on the “brink of catastrophe.”
Ambulances in Los Angeles county are waiting up to eight hours to offload their patients at hospitals, according to Cathy Chidester, director of Los Angeles County’s Emergency Medical Services. In some instances, ambulances are being redirected, or potential patients simply sent home.
A nurse in Southern California sent the World Socialist Web Site a photo of a refrigerated semi-truck that had just arrived at the hospital they work east of Los Angeles. Hospitals and mortuaries across the state are placing rental orders for similar units to handle the mounting casualties as they overwhelm the healthcare system.
Continental Funeral Home in Los Angeles told ABC 7 news that itself and every other funeral home they know are past their capacity to handle bodies. The owner reports that it is removing bodies at six times its normal rate.
The Southern California nurse spoke to the WSWS about how the lack of staffing is a critical issue in the unfolding catastrophe.
“We are stretched so thin, the more patients we take care of the less we can safely take care of,” she said. Continuing, “I hate to say it but when you’re exhausted maybe you miss things, maybe doctors will miss things.”
“The other morning, I had three deaths by 9 a.m. and my shift started at 6 a.m.… Recently we had a 25-year-old who died and his only comorbidity was obesity. He was crying and scared to be intubated. He was a little boy. His heart gave out and he died. Another nurse was there holding his hand because his mom wasn’t there.”
“When you are in the moment you do everything you can, you are numb to things, but after I heard [another patient] was doing better I sat in the car and cried for an hour. It doesn’t mean she is out of the woods yet but after so much death, we take these victories.”
There is a large outbreak of the virus among the tens of thousands of homeless people living in Los Angeles. In the fall, recorded cases among the homeless were at 60 a week in the city. It has since risen in the last week to almost 550 a week. Rev. Andrew Bales, director of Union Rescue Mission, told the Los Angeles Times, “all of skid row and many agencies/missions are hot spots. All are overwhelmed.”
Because of the lag between infection and symptoms, the impact of both Christmas and New Year’s activities and shopping are only beginning to result in hospitalizations. Because of these, epidemiologists predict January may easily be a more deadly month than December.
Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, warned CNN of a “total collapse of the health care system” if case numbers continue to rise.
Because of the inadequacy of medical services, including insufficient medical workers, emergency medical workers have deployed to various parts of the state. The Army Core of Engineers have now been deployed to Los Angeles County to supplement the inadequate oxygen supplies of the area. In the Central Valley region, a poorer area dominated by agriculture, 1200 emergency medical workers were sent last week to treat patients as hospitalization from the pandemic more than doubled in several counties last month.
In statements made over the weekend, Los Angeles’ Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti sought to blame the pandemic on the population, remarking, “It’s so critical we change our behavior. Everybody’s doing something but everybody can do more.” The hypocrisy of this statement is staggering. In Los Angeles, major malls are open, with thousands of people inside. Factories are open. The film industry is open.
Garcetti, alongside other California Democrats have sought to place the blame of the pandemic on workers and small business owners, while insisting that the major operations of money making remain open throughout the state. Lockdown measures that do nothing to halt the major public spreads of the virus, while leaving workers and small business owners penniless, are hypocritical and fully inadequate to stop the virus.
Last Wednesday, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom even announced plans for the reopening of California’s schools, which includes a significant, $450 per student, financial incentive to school districts that achieve reopening. A financial incentive like this could pressure officials to fudge infection numbers like they have in Florida.
One year into the pandemic, 65,000 deaths in the US in one month
One year after the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in China, December was the deadliest month of the pandemic both in the United States and throughout the world.
More than 65,000 Americans lost their lives to the virus over the past 28 days. At the present rate, deaths in December will be double what they were in November, when nearly 37,000 people died. The United States accounts for about a third of the global death toll of 175,000 over the past month.
By the end of this week, total deaths in the US will surpass 350,000, and the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 will reach 20 million. Another 193,000 people could die in this country over the next two months, according to predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Experts have warned that even this scenario may be optimistic. “We very well might see a post-seasonal—in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s—surge,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday. “The projections are just nightmarish,” Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN.
In a warning to the rest of the world, the number of daily new cases hit an all-time record of 42,000 in the UK yesterday, driven by the emergence of a new strain of the disease that medical experts estimate is 56 percent more transmissible than the original.
US Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir said Monday that the new and more dangerous strain of the virus is “likely” already present in the United States. He was left to speculate because, unlike the UK, the US does not have a genetic surveillance system in place to ascertain the presence of different strains of the disease.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge throughout the country. “California is now the only place (state or country) in the world” with more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases per million people, noted physician Eric Topol.
Southern California, the state’s most populous region, as well as San Joaquin Valley, in the state’s center, have zero percent ICU bed capacity. On Sunday, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said that the hospital faced a “massive crisis.” Another hospital in the region has begun issuing guidelines for patients and families as to how the hospital will make decisions on who will live and who will die if care has to be rationed.
In the midst of this disaster, no section of the US political establishment is calling for emergency measures to contain the pandemic. Last week, President-elect Joe Biden warned that the “darkest days are ahead of us, not behind us.” And yet he has rejected the demand by Dr. Michael Osterholm and other scientists for an emergency shutdown of nonessential production, declaring, “I am not going to shut down the economy, period.”
Despite campaigning in opposition to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Biden has adopted Trump’s signature policy demands: “open the schools” and “open the businesses.”
This is despite the influx of scientific data proving the importance of closing schools and businesses in containing COVID-19. A study published this month in Science found that closing schools and universities reduces the spread of COVID-19 by 38 percent, and closing nonessential face-to-face businesses reduced transmission by 18 percent.
In the media, the scale of the catastrophe unfolding in the United States is less and less reported. A deliberate decision has been made to focus attention not on mass death and the overwhelming of the US health care system, but on the initial production and distribution of vaccines.
But as the federal government begins distributing vaccine doses to states, the US has inoculated just one-tenth of the number of people it had planned—just 2 million of the 20 million people health authorities said would be vaccinated by the end of the year. Images emerged yesterday of hundreds of elderly patients lining up for limited doses.
A report in Kaiser Health News called the US vaccine rollout a “mess,” noting that many states have not received close to the number they were promised. The publication wrote: “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the US health-care system has shown that it is not built for a coordinated pandemic response (among many other things)… Why should vaccine distribution be any different?”
Even in the best of circumstances, the vaccine will not be broadly available until sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Moreover, scientists have warned that the emergence of the new, more infectious strain of the virus means that a higher percentage of the population will have to be vaccinated to stop community spread of the coronavirus.
The refusal of the entire political establishment to take the necessary measures to save lives is a continuation of its policy throughout the pandemic. No measures will be taken that contravene the interests of the financial oligarchy. To this end, governments around the world embraced the doctrine of “herd immunity”—calling for the mass infection of the population, with one White House official declaring, “We want them infected.”
This has led to the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of fatalities, together with the greatest surge of hunger and unemployment since the Great Depression. On the other hand, this same policy has produced the massive enrichment of the financial oligarchy, whose wealth has soared as the US central bank pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets.
And the markets continue their relentless rise. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 200 points to a new record yesterday, leading to a further rise in the wealth of US billionaires. Over the past year, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has seen his fortune grow by $77 billion, hitting $192 billion on Monday. The wealth of Elon Musk, now the second richest man in the world, has surged from $28.5 billion to $160 billion.
Urgent measures must be taken to prevent mass death! But this requires that the working class intervene independently, in opposition to the pandemic profiteers and their political representatives.
The Socialist Equality Party demands the immediate closure of all nonessential businesses and schools. This must be accompanied by full compensation for lost wages and small business income, paid for through the expropriation of the vast sums hoarded by the rich. Trillions of dollars must be invested in health care infrastructure to treat, contain and eradicate COVID-19, and ensure that society is protected from the threat of infectious diseases in the future.
The Socialist Equality Party and our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International have advanced these demands for nearly a year. If these measures had been implemented at the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved in the United States, Europe and around the world.
The SEP calls on all workers to organize emergency action committees to enforce emergency measures, including the shutdown of nonessential production. This struggle raises the question of who controls society, the capitalist class on the basis of profit, or the working class on the basis of social need.
The pandemic is demonstrating the basic reality that capitalism is at war with society. The working class must mobilize in a united struggle against this bankrupt and homicidal system.
Democrats Claim Georgia Is the Next California Due to Mass Immigration
Democrats are looking to put the state of Georgia on a fast-track to becoming their next deep blue stronghold like California, primarily due to mass immigration that has increased their voting blocs.
In a report by the Guardian, Democrats said they are fiercely courting the votes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — 3-in-4 of which were born outside the United States — in Georgia’s pair of runoff races on January 5 where Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) faces a challenge from Democrat Raphael Warnock and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) is facing Democrat Jon Ossoff.
“When you think about California, what it was like 30 or 40 years ago, that’s Georgia. It’s on a trajectory of change,” an Asian American social justice activist told the Guardian. A Republican presidential candidate has not won the state of California since 1988. The Los Angeles Times has credited immigration to California with helping turn the state blue.
Now, for the Senate runoffs, Democrats said they want to “replicate” foreign-born voter turnout for Biden in Georgia for Ossoff and Warnock.
The Guardian reports:
Historic turnout among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters – who make up the fastest-growing segment of Georgia’s electorate – helped Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. According to national exit polls, nearly two-thirds of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters cast their ballot for Biden. [Emphasis added]
…
Now Democrats hope to replicate their success among Asian Americans in a pair of runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the US Senate. The campaigns for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock say they view the AAPI community as critical to winning their races. Both teams have hired AAPI constituency directors to lead multilingual and multicultural outreach programs, that includes campaign visits to AAPI-owned small businesses and advertising in ethnic media. [Emphasis added]
Specifically, data published by the Guardian indicates that Georgia’s Asian American population has grown nearly 140 percent since the year 2000 as the U.S. has admitted roughly more than 1.2 million legal immigrants a year for the last three decades.
Georgia’s Asian Americans include those from India, China, Korea, and Vietnam and about 8-in-10 said they do not speak English at home. Their arrival has helped shift county electorates in favor of Democrats.
“Many of these newcomers have made their homes in the sprawling suburbs around Atlanta, helping to turn these once-Republican strongholds into political battlegrounds,” The Guardian reports.
The New York Times and a Washington Post columnist have recently acknowledged that Democrats are leaning heavily on the results of mass immigration to Georgia to flip the state blue as they have done in Virginia and Orange County, California.
“The emergence in Georgia of Asian-American voters is a potential bright spot for a Democratic Party counting on demographic changes to bring political wins across the country,” the Times reported last month.
Democrats Relying on Results of Mass Immigration to Flip Georgia Blue https://t.co/eC2WFakg6j
— John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) December 21, 2020
Analysis by the Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein has previously revealed that congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average, a little more than 14 percent, have a 90 percent chance of being won by Democrats over Republicans.
The number of foreign-born voters and their voting-age children in Georgia has boomed by 337 percent between 2000 to 2020. Meanwhile, the native-born voting-age population in Georgia has increased by just 22 percent over that same period.
The drastic “demographics changes,” as described by multiple establishment media outlets, has made the electoral map increasingly easier for Democrats.
The Washington Post, New York Times, the Atlantic, Axios, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all admitted that rapid demographic changes because of immigration are tilting the nation toward a permanent Democrat dominance.
“The single biggest threat to Republicans’ long-term viability is demographics,” Axios acknowledged last year. “The numbers simply do not lie … there’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans.”
At current legal immigration levels, the U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters by 2040. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will have arrived through the process known as “chain migration” where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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