At Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, they have implemented their COVID-19 surge plan.
"We are already seeing overflow of our intensive care unit into the post-anesthesia care unit or the PAC-U," said Dr. Christopher Colwell, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Zuckerberg SF General Hospital.
Dr. Colwell says a combination of the Thanksgiving and Christmas surge plus New Year cases all at once, left them no other option but to add additional floors to treat COVID-19 patients.
"At least 4 regular floor wards and 3 ICU areas," said Dr. Colwell.
Currently, Zuckerberg SF General Hospital has 59 COVID-19 positive cases. This is the highest number of cases they've had in the entire pandemic. A number of cases that automatically puts them in the orange level of their surge plan, one case away from the highest level.
San Francisco health officials gave an update on the stay-at-home order, quarantine rules, COVID-19 cases, coronavirus hospitalizations and the vaccine rollout in the city at a Tuesday press conference.
Los Angeles County reported another 20,414 new cases of COVID-19 and 207 additional deaths Friday, although 40 of the deaths were from a backlog associated with a Spectrum outage and holiday reporting delays.
"That's because a lot of people are closed for the holidays in terms of labs so they are not reporting these numbers until people open back up next week. So, what will happen probably next week is a huge bump in cases," said Dr. Chin-Hong.
In March, medical experts met to discuss a response plan for an unprecedented rise in cases. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong says those meetings equipped them for what could take place in the upcoming weeks.