BALDWIN PARK, Calif. — For the last few days, Dr. John Bigley has known what the New Year will bring: an even more ferocious battle with COVID-19.
“It’s been very hard," he said. "At times you feel like a general in a war."
An intensive care specialist and the chief of staff at Baldwin Park Medical Center in San Gabriel Valley, Dr. Bigley has been working 13-hour days, seven days a week.
A post-Thanksgiving surge in COVID infections has pushed his hospital and staff to the brink.
Baldwin Park is already at above capacity, with the number of COVID patients quadrupling in the last few weeks. Of the 232 people admitted to the hospital, 170 are COVID patients.
The ICU is also overflowing. Before Thanksgiving it had eight patients. Now it has 40.
“This has been something that I never would have imagined,” Dr. Bigely said. “It’s been a very difficult time for our physicians.”
Almost every department in his hospital has been overrun by COVID. Accommodating the influx of patients, he said, has been a challenge. The average waiting time to be admitted to the hospital is now 13 hours.
“Ive never seen anything like this,” he said. “I go home, I have to do work regarding planning for the hospital and then I come to work in the morning and it’s all day long.”
But as bad as things are now, they’re about to get much worse, as the hospital braces for more infections from Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
“We’re well over capacity now, if we see another bump like we just saw on top of what we have right now, we’re in very deep trouble,” he said.
The hospital is quickly running out of options. It already converted one of its floors into a secondary ICU. It still has a few beds left in the maternity ward and the Anesthesia Deparment. Once those are filled, the hospital may consider an even more drastic measure, such as turning more areas into ICUs or even using its outside tents, erected in April to triage COVID patients, as an additional intensive care unit.
But even that may not be enough. In that case, Dr. Bigley said, the hospital may have to start rationing care.
“All of our statistics and analytics suggest we’re still surging, we don’t see it attenuating at the moment,” he said. “If it continues to go up we will absolutely be in a similar situation than New York,” he said.