(Los Angeles) The number of COVID patients – 18 hospitalized in Los Angeles hit a new record this week -end, the health authorities of the megalopolis being particularly concerned about the high rate of infection of young adults.
Posted on 20 July 2020 at 16 h 07
France Media Agency
In Florida, another focus of the epidemic on American soil, the health crisis continued to worsen and Monday only remained 16% of beds available in intensive care units.
Los Angeles County, which represents 10 millions of inhabitants alone, counted Sunday 2216 patients hospitalized after contracting the new coronavirus, against 2193 on 15 July, date of the previous record.
Of the patients currently hospitalized, 26% are in an intensive care unit and 19% were placed on a respirator, underline the health authorities.
“We continue to reach worrying levels,” said County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.
“At the moment, young adults are hospitalized at a rate never seen before,” she noted, before warning this category of the population. “As young as you are, you are vulnerable to this virus.”
According to official figures, more than half of 2848 new cases of COVID – 19 identified on Sunday concerned patients 40 years or less.
The record for hospitalizations was accompanied in California by a series of cases of severe inflammatory syndrome affecting children. Fifteen of them were diagnosed last week after developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome, linked to infection with the novel coronavirus.
Nationally, this syndrome has already caused the death of six children.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Sunday renewed his warnings about the pandemic, once again repeating that the city was “on the brink” of new containment due to the outbreak of COVID- 19 those last weeks.
The mayor also felt that California had lifted too soon the health restrictions it had been the first state to impose at the end of March.
“Mayors often have no control over what reopens or not, it is played out at the state or county level, and I recognize that these reopenings have come too quickly”, Eric Garcetti said on the CNN channel.
In Florida, more than 9500 people with COVID – 18 were in the hospital on Monday, with more than 10 300 new cases identified in 20 hours, and more than 5000 deaths in total since the start of the pandemic.
Criticized for his management of the health crisis and in particular his refusal to order the wearing of the generalized mask, the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis called on his patients to do a serological test and to donate their plasma if they had any antibody.
According to some experts, this plasma transfusion could help patients with the most severe forms of COVID – 18 to fight infection.
