California orders surgery delays as virus swamps hospitals

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hospitals in California are so swamped by the coronavirus pandemic that the state has ordered those with room to accept patients from others that are out of intensive care beds.

The public health order issued Tuesday night could result in patients being shipped to Northern California from Southern California and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where 14 counties were immediately ordered to delay nonessential “and non-life threatening” surgeries in order to provide beds. The order, which will last at least three weeks, will also apply to any county where ICU capacity to treat COVID-19 patients is bottoming out.

“If we continue to see an alarming increase of COVID-19 patient admissions at hospitals statewide, some facilities may not be able to provide the critical and necessary care Californians need, whether those patients have COVID-19 or another medical condition,” said Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, the state's public health officer.

The order could be a bellwether for California, where officials have warned some hospitals may have to start rationing care if an expected post-holiday surge in COVID-19 cases overwhelms the health care system.

For much of the year, the nation’s most populous state did the right things to avoid a catastrophe. But now the virus is raging and California remains at or near the top of the list of states with the most newly confirmed cases per capita. Even with vaccines now being administered, albeit slowly, it is expected to take many more weeks to quell the contagion.

Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, where patients are being housed in its former gift shop, a chapel, tents and hallways, had more COVID-19 patients on Tuesday than its total capacity. The hospital, which serves a largely Black and Latino population in the south part of the...