Close to half a year ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to target
businesses that refused to follow public health orders meant to control the spread of COVID-19. But in that time, even as many restaurants and other businesses continued to operate in violation of safety restrictions, state regulators issued only 424 citations and suspended only two business licenses as of Monday, data from regulatory and law enforcement agencies show.
As Californians find themselves deep in an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases, and hospitals find themselves calamitously flooded with new COVID-19 patients, it raises the question:
Is it time to reconsider the state’s relatively light touch on enforcement?
In October, fewer than 150 patients infected with the coronavirus were being admitted daily into hospitals.
By late November, that number had doubled to about 300 patients a day as high as it’s ever been in the entire pandemic.
And now it has more than doubled yet again, to roughly 700 new hospital patients daily, just a few days before Christmas. That rate is bringing crisis to L.A. County.
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If disease transmission behavior does not change, a projection issued by the county Department of Health Services says that L.A. County could be headed to between 700 and 1,400 new hospitalized patients a day by New Year’s Eve.
L.A. hospitals are being stretched increasingly thin as the massive surge in coronavirus cases roars ahead unabated. Things are getting so bad that we could be looking at rationed care in the not-too-distant future. We have no ICU beds, said Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer of L.A. County-USC Medical Center, one of the area s largest hospitals. We are just continually, 24 hours a day scrambling to move patients around. The flood just continues.
Within a matter of days, County-USC will be forced to make its exhausted staff treat even more patients than they have been, he said. We are the safety net, that is the point, Spellberg said. The safety net itself is stressed to the limit.