California suspends pollution-control limits to deal with backlog in cremations

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California suspends pollution-control limits to deal with backlog in cremations

By Robert Jablon

Los Angeles: California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District has suspended some pollution-control limits on the number of cremations for at least 10 days in order to deal with a backlog of bodies at hospitals and funeral homes.

"The current rate of death is more than double that of pre-pandemic years," the agency said on Sunday, local time.

Workers put bodies into a refrigerated trailer at the offices of the Los Angeles County Coroner this month.

Workers put bodies into a refrigerated trailer at the offices of the Los Angeles County Coroner this month.Credit: ABC7 Los Angeles via AP

It came as California on Monday became the first state to record more than 3 million known coronavirus infections.

The grim milestone, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, wasn’t entirely unexpected in a state with 40 million residents but its speed stunning. The state only reached 2 million reported cases on Christmas Eve.

Adding to concerns, California is experiencing new, possibly more transmissible forms of COVID-19.
The state health department announced on Sunday that an L452R variant of the virus is increasingly showing up in genetic sequencing of COVID-19 test samples from several counties.

The variant was first identified last year in California and in other states and countries but has been identified more frequently since November and in several large outbreaks in Northern California’s Santa Clara County, the department said.

Overall, the variant has been found in at least a dozen counties. In some places, testing has found the variant in a quarter of the samples sequenced, said Dr Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

However, not all test samples receive genetic sequencing to identify variants so its frequency wasn’t immediately clear.

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Health officials said it was linked to a Christmas-time outbreak at Kaiser Permanente San Jose that infected at least 89 staff members and patients, killing a receptionist. The outbreak has been blamed on an employee who visited the hospital emergency room wearing an air-powered inflatable Christmas tree costume.

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The variant is different from another mutation, B117, that was first reported in the United Kingdom and appears to spread much more easily, although it doesn’t appear to make people sicker. That variant has already shown up in San Diego County and Los Angeles County announced over the weekend that it had detected its first case.

The first coronavirus case in California was confirmed on January 25 last year. It took 292 days to get to 1 million infections on November 11 and 44 days to top 2 million.
California’s caseload is also far ahead of other large states. Texas had more than 2 million and Florida topped 1.5 million.

The state has recorded more than 33,600 deaths related to COVID-19.

A caseload surge that began last fall has strained hospitals and especially intensive care units as a percentage of the infected — typically estimated to be around 12 per cent by public health officials — become sick enough weeks later to need medical care.

On average, California has seen about 500 deaths and 40,000 new cases daily for the past two weeks.
Officials warn that a recent slight downward trend in hospitalisations could reverse when the full impact of New Year’s Eve gathering transmissions is felt.

The state is placing its hopes on mass vaccinations to reduce the number of infections but there have been snags in the immunisation drive.

Allergic reactions

On Sunday, Dr Erica S. Pan, the state epidemiologist, urged that providers stop using one lot of a Moderna vaccine because some people needed medical treatment for possible severe allergic reactions. She did not specify the number of cases involved or where they occurred.

Moderna in a statement said the company "is unaware of comparable adverse events from other vaccination centres which may have administered vaccines from the same lot."

The CDC has said COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects for a few days that include fever, chills, headache, swelling or tiredness, "which are normal signs that your body is building protection".

However, severe reactions are extremely rare. Pan said in a vaccine similar to Moderna’s, the rate of anaphylaxis — in which an immune system reaction can block breathing and cause blood pressure to drop — was about 1 in 100,000.

The announcement came as California counties continue to plead for more COVID-19 vaccine as the state tries to tamp down its rate of infection, which has resulted in record numbers of hospitalisations and deaths.

California has shipped about 3.2 million doses of the vaccine — which requires two doses for full immunisation — to local health departments and healthcare systems, the state’s Department of Public Health reported Monday.

Only about 1.4 million of those doses, or around 40 per cent, have been administered. So far, the state has vaccinated fewer than 2500 people per 100,000 residents, a rate that falls well below the national average, according to federal data.

Although Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that anyone age 65 and older would be eligible to start receiving the vaccine, Los Angeles County and some others have said they do not have enough doses to vaccinate that many people and are first concentrating on inoculating healthcare workers and the most vulnerable elderly living in care homes.

The death rate from COVID-19 in Los Angeles County — the nation’s most populous and an epicentre of the state pandemic — works out to about one person every six minutes.

AP

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