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December 16, 2020
The OC Health Care Agency is deploying mobile field hospitals (MFHs) to local hospitals this week to support facilities overwhelmed by a surge in COVID-19 patients.
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The County reported 2,173 more coronavirus cases on Tuesday with 10.4 percent of adult intensive care unit beds available in the local hospital system.
The mobile units can expand current hospital capacity by adding more beds to existing grounds. They are housed in large trailers and contain canvas tents with hard flooring and temperature-controlled units equipped with running water, toilets and showers, generators and air purifiers. The Health Care Agency has eight trailers to support at least 200 patient beds.
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It’s a light at the end of the tunnel for what has been a challenging year the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in Orange County.
On Wednesday, five staff members were selected from Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange to receive the first vaccinations in Orange County from Pfizer-BioNTech. Jeremy Zoch, chief executive officer at St. Joseph Hospital of Orange, said the doses arrived just hours before a joint news conference at the hospital.
Each inoculation was streamed live and greeted with a round of applause.
“It’s been a long road. A lot [of people] have worked really hard to get us to this point. [We’re] very, very grateful to Pfizer and, soon, Moderna, for what they have done,” said Erik Wexler, the chief executive for Providence’s Southern California region. “Soon, we will be protecting all of our caregivers in our community and eradicating this horrific pandemic.”
Wednesday, Dec. 16. Here’s what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
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We’ve been feeling a little brighter now that the first batch of authorized COVID-19 vaccines is being deployed in California. But that shouldn’t obscure the extraordinarily bleak situation we’re facing in the pandemic or the overwhelming burden that it’s putting on doctors and nurses statewide.
Late Wednesday, the Orange County Health Care Agency issued an order suspending the ability of hospitals that take part in the 911 system to request a diversion of ambulances to other medical centers. Dr. Carl Schultz, the agency s EMS medical director, said in a statement that hospital emergency rooms have become so overwhelmed due to the COVID surge that almost all hospitals were going on diversion. If nothing was done, ambulances would soon run out of hospitals that could take their patients, Schultz said. Therefore, we temporarily suspended ambulance diversion. While this will place some additional stress on hospitals, it will spread this over the entire county and help to mitigate the escalating concern of finding hospital destinations for ambulances.