Hospitals reported more than 110,000 coronavirus patients on each of the past two days, a record count for the pandemic, according to tracking by The Washington Post. Covid-19 patients at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, a 600-bed public hospital, have “blown past” its earlier record in July, said Brad Spellberg, the hospital’s chief medical officer. The hospital has 150 covid-19 patients and 50 in the ICU. Besides California, mounting cases and hospitalizations in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina continue to push some regions and hospital systems to crisis conditions, while the Upper Midwest and Plains states are finally seeing plateaus. She said several of the system’s 10 hospitals are so overstretched that staff have spent the past week calling patients to cancel non-urgent appointments past the new year.

Source: Washington Post December 17, 2020 00:49 UTC