The national guard has been deployed to hospitals in rural north and central California, where short-staffed hospitals have been overwhelmed with coronavirus patients – exposing stark disparities within the most populous US state.
Although California has the lowest coronavirus case rate in the country, its agricultural heartland in the Central Valley and its sparse, rural north have case rates that are three or four times higher. National guard medical teams have been deployed to several hospitals in the valley’s Bakersfield and Kern counties, and to two hospitals in Shasta county in the far north.
“This Delta-related surge has been far beyond anything I thought we would be dealing with, especially with the wide availability of the vaccine,” said Mary Lynn Briggs, an ICU nurse at Mercy hospitals in Bakersfield, where a team of 16 national guard have been deployed. She and her colleagues have been beaten down by the constant surge of deaths, including the preventable deaths of unvaccinated younger patients – and a few have recently left, she said. “I don’t know if I can even do this any more,” said Briggs.
In Shasta, which has one of the highest coronavirus case rates in the state, hospitals have also been affected by the nearby Fawn fire – which forced thousands, including medical staff, to evacuate their homes last week, a spokesperson for hospitals in the region told the Record Searchlight. Across swaths of the north and the Central Valley, the introduction of the Delta variant and resistance to vaccines and public health mandates have precipitated a surge of cases that have overwhelmed emergency rooms and intensive departments. Emergency dispatchers have been asked not to send out ambulances to patients unless they meet certain criteria, to avoid pile-ups outside hospitals.
The valley and northern California, which had seen anti-mask protests throughout the pandemic, were the regions with the highest support for a gubernatorial recall campaign that sought to unseat the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, largely over his pandemic business restrictions, vaccine mandates and other public health policies.
Even as the number of new cases begins to taper down in some areas, hospitals remain stretched caring for Covid-19 patients.
Nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists have all been working overtime, in some cases taking on multiple 18-hour shifts in a row. At some hospitals, patients have waited for days for ICU beds, and have had to be treated for critical conditions in the emergency department while waiting. Exhausted and overstretched healthcare workers are constantly worried about making mistakes or failing patients, said Kenny Banh, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCSF Fresno and an ER doctor at Community Regional medical center in the valley city of Fresno.
National guard have been deployed in other states with sky-high case rates, including Indiana and Georgia. In California, where high vaccination rates in coastal metropolises have helped quell the Delta-driven surge, the national guard were deployed in the winter to hospitals in the south.
In the valley, agricultural workers – many of whom lack legal status and access to medical care – were the hardest hit as the extra-infectious Delta variant began to circulate, and Latino and Black residents remain disproportionately affected. In rural regions where the number of physicians per capita was already two and a half times lower than in the Bay Area, this latest surge has pushed the healthcare system to the brink. “We’re a long way from herd immunity, and thinking about what lies ahead just scares me to death,” said Mary Lynn Briggs, a nurse at one of the hospitals in Bakersfield, where national guard have been deployed.