The COVID-19 surge experts saw coming and the public ignored
COVID-19 hospitalizations at the four major South Bay medical centers increased from 46 on Nov. 1, to 506 on Wed., Dec. 23. Sources: California Department of Public Health and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Chart by Bernard Wong ( More charts at SubliminalMachines.com)
The week before Thanksgiving, public health experts throughout California not only implored people to forgo family gatherings but provided data points and projections showing what might happen were that advice ignored. In Los Angeles County, forecasts from three respected public health institutions — Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and UCSD — each projected an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations.
An aggregate of these three forecasts assembled by Manhattan Beach data analyst Bernard Wong on Thanksgiving Day showed a projected 6,130 hospitalizations occuring on December 18. It seemed almost preposterous at the time; hospitalizations had for months largely stayed below 1,000, following a surge which reached its apex at just over 2,000 hospitalizations in mid-July. Then, in November, a gradual uptick to 1,800 hospitalizations took place over three weeks. After Thanksgiving, the numbers began a steeper ascent. The actual total of COVID-19 hospitalizations on December 18 was 5,424 patients.
Wong noted that the difference between the projected and actual hospitalizations represents a variance of just 11.5 percent.
“If you think this isn’t close at all, bear in mind this prediction is already substantially more than the peaks of the two [previous] hospitalization surges added together,” Wong wrote in an analysis posted on his website, Subliminal Machines. “Who would have thought such an unlikely, unprecedented forecast of hospitalized COVID-19 patients of this magnitude four weeks into the future could be remotely accurate? Perhaps these experts with their predictive models actually know what they are talking about? And if we can accept this, then perhaps we should also stop second-guessing the experts and heed their recommendations and public safety orders?”
Dr. Anita Sircar, an infectious disease specialist who works at three South Bay hospitals, two days before Thanksgiving wrote an urgent note on her personal Facebook page that went viral. It was titled, “WE ARE NOT BEING HEARD.” In the post (which later became an Easy Reader cover story) Sircar recounted the excruciating deaths she’d witnessed over the previous eight months and implored people to not gather for Thanksgiving.
“People always ask what they can do to help the frontline and I always say the same thing: stay home…Your sacrifice to spend the holidays alone this year to ensure all those you love are around your table next year is a small sacrifice,” she wrote.
Sircar’s advice, and that of most public health experts, again went largely unheeded. In an appearance on a Facebook Live show hosted by Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, Sircar noted that local ICUs are now entirely full of COVID-19 patients. She said they expected the surge after Thanksgiving, but it came sooner and has been unrelenting since.
“When Thanksgiving happened, we were already preparing for 14 days post-Thanksgiving to see an increase in cases, which we did,” Sircar said. “We actually started seeing cases 10 days after Thanksgiving, which was much quicker than we thought. We’re still trying to catch our breaths, and the surge has not gone down since Thanksgiving.”
Sircar said hospitals have witnessed a trend in which younger patients, many in their 30s and 40s, are increasingly severely impacted by the virus, many fatally. This week, on a day seven people died in one local ICU, one of the patients was a 31-year-old man who had been in good health.
“And when patients are admitted we are systematically asking them the question, ‘Where do you think you got infected?’” Sircar said. “And then we’ll ask them ‘Did you go to Thanksgiving dinner?’ And most of the time The answer is yes. ‘I went to dinner.’ I had a young girl who I admitted just last week, 31 years old, who went to a family dinner in Long Beach with 30 people, 17 who tested positive, six who were admitted to the hospital, and one who will certainly die. And she can clock it to when she started feeling symptoms, right after that Thanksgiving dinner. And almost the same story happens over and over again. We’ll ask patients if they attended a Thanksgiving dinner, and they’ll say ‘’Yes, but it was only a small dinner. There were only 15 of us. Or 20 of us. Or nine of us. But most of us got sick.’”
Brand said he posted warnings about gatherings on his Facebook and received blowback from people who accused him of politicizing the pandemic.
“Our local ICUs are full and people are still planning family gatherings,” Brand said. “Everyone should talk to who they know in the medical field and reconsider any travel plans. That’s how this virus spreads, and that’s how we will stop it.”
LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn said the lack of adherence to public health orders seems almost hopeless to combat.
“It is frustrating. We are dealing with people who don’t believe this virus is real or don’t think it is dangerous,” Hahn said. “They have heard our messages to stay home and not to have gatherings, but they just don’t think they need to. I don’t know what we can do to deal with this gap between the real threat of this virus and what people believe.”
By December 22, hospitalizations were at 5,866 in LA County. Hospitals are bracing for an even bigger increase after Christmas.
“At this point, the only thing giving me hope is the vaccine,” Hahn said. “It is the only way we are going to get control of this virus if we cannot convince people to follow health guidelines. I am focused on making sure County residents get this vaccine as quickly as possible.”
A sign of how dire the situation has become is that nearly every area hospital has been forced to utilize refrigerated morgue trucks that were put in place when the pandemic began, a contingency plan health professionals desperately hoped would never be needed.
“When California hospitals first developed their surge plans back in March in anticipation of the potential 40 percent increase in patient volume due to COVID-19, the need to have temporary morgues was necessary,” said Andrew Werts, the director of communications for Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Centers. “This unfortunate reality was a necessity at most California hospitals. This need was not only for the hospitals, but also to handle the additional pressure put on local mortuaries as well.”
Brand, in his annual State of the City Message, expressed hope that vaccines would represent “a light at the end of this pandemic tunnel.”
“But the tunnel is still very dark,” Brand wrote. “As of this writing, our hospitals are hitting new records daily of COVID patients sick enough to be hospitalized. Most are now in the 20 to 49-year-old demographic. The holiday gatherings are here and according to the frontline staff in our local hospitals, which are extremely overworked, it is now these intimate holiday gatherings that people think are safe but are now the main cause of this deadly surge.”
Brand then shared a haiku a resident had written to him:
“We isolate now
So that when we gather again
No one is missing.”