Protect me, says nurse getting California COVID-19 vaccine bakersfield.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bakersfield.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Saturday, 4 a.m. Erin Teran wakes up for work. Within 30 minutes, she is out the door, picking up a coffee and driving more than an hour away from her home in Indio to Imperial Valley. She checks in at the hospital by 6:30 a.m., a half-hour before her shift so the night nurse can leave at a decent hour.
The day before, the Imperial County Public Health Department released its latest COVID-19 numbers: There were two beds left in the county s intensive care units, 135 of them filled with COVID-19 patients.
Teran had five patients. By the end of her nearly 14-hour shift, she d lost one of them.
More COVID-19 Vaccinations Arrive in Southland, but Virus Fight Goes on By City News Service Los Angeles UPDATED 7:30 PM ET Dec. 15, 2020 PUBLISHED 12:46 PM ET Dec. 14, 2020 PUBLISHED 12:46 PM EST Dec. 14, 2020
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LOS ANGELES (CNS) More Los Angeles County hospitals started receiving shipments of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday, one day after initial doses were administered at a Kaiser Permanente facility in Hollywood.
Vaccinations were due to arrive Tuesday and Wednesday at the rest of the nine sites in the county equipped with the ultra-cold-storage facilities needed for the Pfizer medication. The vaccines will then be farmed out to 83 acute-care hospitals countywide for administration to health care workers, who are at the top of the priority list to receive the initial doses.
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With cameras clicking and Gov. Gavin Newsom standing beside her wearing a surgical mask, intensive care nurse Helen Cordova rolled up the sleeve of her blue scrubs Monday afternoon and became one of the first Californians to get a coronavirus vaccine.
“Protect me,” she said with a laugh, just before nurse Marilyn Lansangan jabbed her right deltoid.
Cheers broke out from the small, masked crowd of doctors, nurses and elected officials before the syringe was even out of Cordova’s arm.
The inoculation in a conference room at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center ushered in a hopeful new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has sickened more than 1.6 million Californians and killed more than 21,000.
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Intensive care unit beds across Southern California are plummeting to critical levels, with capacity falling to 1% in Ventura County and 0% in Riverside County while Los Angeles County home to 10 million people had fewer than 100 beds available.
But the worst of the surge is still to come, experts say. L.A. County has more than 4,400 people hospitalized with COVID-19, and officials said that number could rise to 5,000 by the weekend.
The shortages come as the coronavirus continues to rage across the state. A Los Angeles Times county-by-county tally showed an unprecedented 42,129 cases reported Monday. That number breaks the single-day record set Dec. 8, when 35,400 coronavirus cases were recorded.