Wednesday, Jan. 6, and I’m your guest host, Tony Barboza. I’m filling in for Julia Wick and writing from Long Beach. We made it through to the New Year, with the surging coronavirus making it the strangest, and perhaps darkest, holiday season in many of our lifetimes. But 2021 isn’t having much of a honeymoon period. The pandemic in California is already at a point of crisis. Cases, deaths and hospitalizations in L.A. and other areas across the state keep rising, signs that we are well into a new spike in infections from holiday gatherings and travel. It’s the beginning of the dreaded “surge on top of a surge on top of a surge” warned of by health officials.