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They draw Pac-Man and boots, bear claws and mountains, and though Shane does well Esther is on an unbelievable hot streak, so much so that when she guesses “Elephants!” from the barest of sketches, Shane gives her that kind of amazed/angry look that says, “Get out of my head!”
The two of them soon erupt into the kind of laughter often shared by old friends. But, they are not old friends.
Shane Sweis is an 11-year-old boy being treated at Long Beach Memorial’s Jonathan Jaques Children’s Cancer Institute for acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.
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As a student nurse, Naomi Muñiz had only given a real shot one time. Yet there she stood inside Long Beach Memorial Hospital, preparing to inoculate healthcare workers against COVID-19 veteran nurses lining up before her and staff treating vials of the vaccine “as literally gold.”
“I felt pretty confident about my technique,” the 23-year-old Cal State Long Beach student said. “You just pinch the arm at the deltoid and go in, straight like a dart.”
But, she said, “I was nervous to get it right.”
By the end of her first shift in December, she had administered 40 shots, joining a growing corps of volunteer student nurses from Cal State universities who are jump-starting their careers at a time when there’s a great need for healthcare professionals trained to administer vaccines.
By NINA AGRAWAL | Los Angeles Times | Published: January 25, 2021
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See other free reports here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. LOS ANGELES (Tribune News Service) As a student nurse, Naomi Muñiz had only given a real shot one time. Yet there she stood inside Long Beach Memorial Hospital, preparing to inoculate healthcare workers against COVID-19 veteran nurses lining up before her and staff treating vials of the vaccine as literally gold. I felt pretty confident about my technique, the 23-year-old Cal State Long Beach student said. You just pinch the arm at the deltoid and go in, straight like a dart.
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Unlike most other already-deployed mobile units around the Long Beach area, the tent will be used for patient care, not just triage.
Construction of the mobile field hospital, including electricity, running water and an HVAC system, is expected to be completed by the weekend but will only be used as a last resort should coronavirus hospitalizations continue to surge across Southern California. Hospitals across the region are bracing for a probable surge following Christmas and New Year’s Eve gatherings.
Now at 578 patients as of Monday, Long Beach-area hospitalizations have more than quadrupled since Nov. 30, with the most drastic increases occurring in mid-December about two weeks after Thanksgiving. Hospitals across Los Angeles and Orange counties have been slammed with massive increases in hospitalizations, with many facilities struggling to keep up with demand.
Health officials and emergency workers painted a dire picture of the situation inside Long Beach hospitals today, as ambulances struggled to keep up with a crush of patients and the city activated a “mass fatality” plan to back up local morgues that are nearing capacity even as more critically ill patients flood local medical centers.
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“The COVID crisis in Long Beach is not getting better; it’s getting worse,” Mayor Robert Garcia said in a news conference Wednesday. “We have to just recognize that we are living through the biggest challenge we have ever faced as a community and a city.”