Officials at a south Los Angeles hospital say that the facility is just too overwhelmed by patients that they had to plant a tent outside to serve as a waiting room.
“Everything is backed up all the way to the street,” Dr. Oscar Casillas, the medical director of the Martin Luther King Hospital said.
The doctor said that rather than receiving the usual 30 patients a day, they now serve more than 100 with the surge in new Covid cases in the community.
The entire building was transformed to care units for Covid patients with gurneys stuffed at the gift shops and the tents acting as waiting rooms.
“We have more Covid patients now than hospitals that are three to four times larger than we are,” Dr. Elaine Batchlor said.
“The testing site on our campus, has a Covid positivity rate of 25 percent, versus 12 to 13 percent countywide. We’re a small community hospital, 131 beds, and we have already exceeded our surge capacity.”
“We started this morning with 206 patients in our 131-bed hospital, and 70 patients in the emergency department – that is a 29-bed emergency department.”
Los Angeles County is where the highest rate of Covid-19 fatalities is recorded. On Thursday, 9,299 deaths were reported in the county, which was nearly 3 percent of the national death toll.
