Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXI): California disparities

Ana B. Ibarra and Hannah Getahun report for CalMatters, with story picked up by Capital Public Radio  Here's the excerpt salient to California's rural-urban divide:

At least 18 counties have more hospitalized COVID-19 patients today than they did this time last year. Another five have just as many.

The vast majority of the ones faring worse are in the Central Valley and rural Northern California, which are still recovering from bad summer surges. Humboldt, Madera and Lassen counties have the biggest year-over-year increases. In Madera, the 7-day average stood at 32 hospitalized patients on Sunday, compared to 13 a year ago. Humboldt had 11 hospitalizations on Sunday compared to three on the same date last year.

It’s a different — and far better — situation in California’s urban counties. Of the state’s 10 most populous counties, all except Fresno have fewer COVID patients in the hospital today than a year ago.

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Last year’s winter surge was harsh for most of the state. But for some counties — including Butte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Shasta and Placer — this summer and fall were even worse. Some saw more patients hospitalized in summer and fall than they did last winter.

In the Central Valley some local hospitals are still strained. And experts say that’s a dangerous situation going into the holidays when another wave of cases is expected.

Here's a Los Angeles Times story from a few days ago about how Central Valley hospitals are trying to move patients to hospitals in other regions.  An excerpt follows, mostly quoting Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County's interim health officer.  

We don’t have enough hospitals to serve the population and the needs.  [Hospitals across the entire San Joaquin Valley are] often running over capacity, so that they’re holding dozens and dozens of patients in the emergency department.

It’s really hard to transfer across counties in the state of California.  When you look at Los Angeles ... they have hundreds and hundreds of open beds in Los Angeles County.

If we need to transfer patients out to keep our hospitals operational, we should really be able to do that with one or two phone calls. That’s not the situation right now. And so that’s a point of frustration that we’re hearing from multiple different facilities.  We’re trying to really decompress as much as possible in anticipation of those winter numbers.

So, part of the problem is about disparities in healthcare infrastructure--not only the incidence in cases.  A dramatic story out of Oklahoma about the struggle to transfer patients from rural to urban hospitals is here.