Orange County hit another high for new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations Sunday, as intensive care units across the Southern California region remained at zero capacity.
O.C. reported another single-day record of 4,606 COVID-19 cases and 15 additional deaths Sunday, bringing the county’s totals to 124,428 cases and 1,775 fatalities.
The county’s record-setting trend of COVID-19 hospitalizations also continued, with 1,682 — a jump from 1,601 on Saturday.
Of the COVID-19 patients in hospitals Sunday, 375 were battling the respiratory illness in intensive care units, up from 361 the previous day.
Both are new records — a daily occurrence dating back to early December.
The figures paint a dire picture just a five days before Christmas, when holiday travel is already ramping up despite warnings from public health officials.
Before the holiday season, the record for ICU patients in Orange County was 245 during the mid-July surge. Overall hospitalizations have been breaking records daily since Dec. 2.
The daily record of hospitalizations prompted O.C. health officials on Tuesday to deploy mobile field hospitals and on Wednesday, suspend ambulance diversion.
County health officials said so many hospitals were requesting ambulances be diverted to other facilities, sending ambulances elsewhere, sometimes 20 minutes away and they were running out of places to bring the patients to.
As a result, the county health agency said it had to halt the practice.
“If nothing was done, ambulances would soon run out of hospitals that could take their patients,” Dr. Carl Schultz, the agency’s EMS medical director, said in a statement Wednesday. “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.”
Schultz added that this temporary suspension of diverting ambulances “has never happened before.”
Intensive care units in Southern California remained at 0% capacity available Sunday for the third consecutive day, according to data from the California Department of Public Health. Northern California had the highest capacity, with 24.2%, while the San Joaquin Valley was still at 0%.