It has been 10 days since Christmas and just as the experts had feared, another surge of COVID-19 cases is building and crippling hospitals.
Some hospitals are so full that in several of the hardest hit counties, including Los Angeles and Santa Clara, patients at times are stuck for hours in ambulances outside.
In San Jose, the fire department has been transporting patients to hospitals because regular ambulances are sometimes waiting to offload other patients.
In the Bay Area, Napa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are all reporting increased cases.
"I think we’re seeing some of the effects from Christmas. This is the first generation of cases that would’ve been transmitted around Christmas but they have a second generation, a third generation after that," said UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. George Rutherford.
He said he has some cause for guarded optimism after Bay Area ICU capacity increased Monday to 8%, from 5% over the weekend.
Santa Clara County Council James Williams said that everyone who traveled away from the region for the holidays must go into a 10-day quarantine upon returning to the Bay Area.
"We urged people not to travel, but if you did anyway you need to quarantine so that you’re not inadvertently getting someone else sick and having someone else end up in the hospital, having someone else die."
At Kaiser San Jose, an employee wore an inflatable costume around the emergency department on Christmas Day to spread holiday cheer. But the hospital now says the employee appears to have transmitted the virus to 44 of their colleagues, one of whom has since died from COVID-19 complications.
The others are in quarantine, putting a further strain on staffing shortages.
