Tuesday, Jan. 19. Here’s what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
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As we start this new week with eyes turned toward Washington, the upcoming inauguration and all the change that is sure to follow, I want to take a moment to
consider two facts about the Southland’s pandemic situation.
First: So many people have died in Los Angeles County that officials have temporarily suspended air-quality regulations that put limits on cremations. The current death rate is “more than double that of pre-pandemic years, leading to hospitals, funeral homes and crematoriums exceeding capacity, without the ability to process the backlog,” the South Coast Air Quality Management District said Sunday.
The department s weekly positivity rate was at 18% in December. That rate is now at 5.6%.
The fire department s Emergency Medical Services Bureau coordinated its first vaccination clinics countywide in late December, administering more than 3,000 vaccines. As expected, the vaccine began to have its impact seven to ten days after the first vaccines were given, said L.A. County Fire Department Medical Director Dr. Clayton Kazan stated. As the County continues to surge, new cases among Department personnel began dropping precipitously as did our test positivity rate. This is the first time in the entire pandemic that our data diverged from that of the County.
By MORGAN WINSOR and ERIN SCHUMAKER, ABC News (NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 95 million people worldwide and killed over 2 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Here’s how the news developed [.]
At the end of 2015, the Los Angeles County Fire Department got some challenging news: The pharmacy director at L.A. County/USC Medical Center, the department’s largest hospital supplier of controlled substances, announced it wasn’t going to supply them any longer. With the liability of medical directors being held personally accountable in cases of diversion, providing a supply to distribute across the department’s 76 paramedic squads and 3,000-square-mile jurisdiction wasn’t worth the risk.
More than just requiring a new supplier, the decision provided an inflection point for L.A. County Fire to reexamine its whole pharmaceutical-procurement process. “The system was so broken,” medical director Clayton Kazan, MD, told viewers of the National Association of EMS Physician’s annual conference Thursday, “that it made us reconsider the whole process from the beginning.”