Mid-January marked the peak of the COVID-19 Omicron surge in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, but with cases still high, staffing has emerged as a major challenge for local hospitals.
The Omicron variant’s high transmissibility has been the primary contributor to the surge’s strength and the pressure put on local hospital systems. The variant has significantly impacted the number of available staffers in addition to the people Omicron has put into hospitals,
“The staffing issue most hospitals are facing is due to the rapid spread of the virus, including breakthrough cases, that have spread among health care workers,” Nick Lymberopoulos, chief executive of Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, wrote in an email. “We are managing that by hiring contract nurses and traveling nurses as needed.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 13 blocked the federal government’s mandate that all companies with at least 100 employees require them to be vaccinated, but let stand the rule for health care workers. Under that mandate, health care workers must be fully vaccinated by March 15 in the 24 states that do not have the measure already in place.
Daphne Yousem, a spokesperson at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, wrote in an email that 92 percent of employees at the hospital are vaccinated and that vaccination mandates have not made the COVID surge harder to manage. “We have plans and protocols in place and work with our parent company HCA to ensure that we have the personnel here at the hospital to take care of our patients,” she wrote.
California instituted a vaccine mandate for health care workers last fall, as well as a mandate for workers to be boosted by Feb. 1, 2022. The California state mandate is not itself having an impact on hospitals handling the surge, according to hospitals that are dealing with high ICU occupancies.
Kaiser Permanente was one of the first major organizations in the United States to announce its own vaccine requirement for its employees and physicians, doing so in August 2021.
“Well under 1 percent of our workforce refused to get vaccinated or obtain a qualified exemption and have left our organization,” Marc Brown, a Kaiser Permanente spokesman, wrote. “Should these employees decide to comply with the mandate and become vaccinated in the future, they will become eligible to apply for open positions at Kaiser Permanente.”
In the Valley region, Kaiser has large facilities in Woodland Hills, Panorama City, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley.
Dignity Health, which oversees Northridge Hospital Medical Center, is another provider that created an internal vaccine requirement unless workers were granted a medical or religious exemption. “Vaccination continues to be key in keeping our community safe and protected from serious complications from the COVID-19 virus,” a Northridge Hospital spokesperson wrote in an email.
Up-down statistics
The highest seven-day average of cases seen so far during the surge in Los Angeles County clocked in at 41,682 on Jan. 15, while the highest average in Ventura was 2,616 on the same day, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Both days represent the highest seven-day average either county has seen throughout the entire pandemic, far exceeding the numbers seen in the 2020-2021 winter surge.
Hospitalization rates and ICU capacity were not pressing issues in the early days of the Omicron surge. However, after holiday celebrations, such numbers climbed significantly.
In the week ending Jan. 20, 15 hospitals and medical centers across the San Fernando Valley, Antelope Valley, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Oxnard and Ventura had ICU occupancy at or above 87 percent. Nearly half of those had ICU occupancies at or above 97 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Nancy Gin, regional medical director for quality for Kaiser Permanente Southern California, shared in a statement that as of Jan. 25, 48 percent of all admitted patients at Kaiser Permanente’s 15 hospitals in Southern California were COVID positive admissions. She added that 58 percent of all ICU patients were COVID positive and that the Southern California Kaiser ICUs were at 93 percent capacity.
Gin wrote that although there is a high ICU usage, the hospitals were using only 25 percent of available ventilators.
COVID-19 deaths are on the rise in Los Angeles and Ventura counties despite the fall in cases, as seven-day averages for both cities reached one of their highest points during the surge on Jan. 24.
Lymberopolous said that while Providence’s numbers are dropping, its health care teams are concerned that a significant percentage of the population has not been fully vaccinated or received booster shots.
“This means more patients, more serious illness and, tragically, more deaths,” Lymberopolous wrote. “That leads to another serious concern — the toll this takes on our caregivers who are working tirelessly to care for patients who, in most cases, would not be so severely ill, had they received their shots.”
Although deaths are on the rise and vaccination rates are imperfect, a comparison between the current surge and that of the 2020-2021 winter surge shows a stark difference.
The previous surge saw L.A. County reporting hundreds of deaths nearly every day in January 2021. In contrast, daily death counts have primarily stayed beneath 100 in January 2022.