Back in late November, a stay at home order was issued in California due to the surge of COVID-19 cases. The shelter-in-place order proved to be effective–with declining cases–until recently. With Christmas and New Year celebrations, many people gathered and traveled despite the stay at home order, which resulted in another rise in COVID-19 numbers. This increase in infection rate has led to hospitals turning away ambulances because of the lack of ICU space.

“I think the rise is probably more just people getting what is called COVID fatigue,” said NDB Science teacher Mallika Srinivasan. “They are tired of being at home and they get a chance, they want to interact and humans are all social animals, and everybody wants to feel it.”

According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, 1,231,569 news cases were detected and 10,540 new deaths due to Covid-19 were reported in California over the past 30 days. California now has a 12.87% in testing positivity, and surpassing 30,000 Covid deaths, ranks third nationally.

“One of the things that I’ve heard recently that ambulances are taking three to four hours to get to patients because they have to wait outside of the emergency rooms to drop these people off,” said Bridget Wylie, NDB nurse. “There’s some I know for a fact that there are some adults that are at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital right now. They’re even using children’s hospitals. The other thing is, one of the ways that the hospitals are dealing with it is that they’re not doing any elective surgeries, or they’re cutting them back.”

In San Mateo County, nearly 9,500 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the past 30 days. The county currently faces issues with hospital staffing and ICU reaching capacity. Hospitals workers are split up As of January 15th, there are 4% ICU beds available in San Mateo.

“One of the things that they have is they could ask people like myself, who haven’t been working if we’d like to come back and work in the hospital,” said Wylie when asked about how the hospitals deal with staffing issues. “They may ask nursing students to help. They also have something called travel nurses who will travel to different places that need extra nurses. They brought in nurses and doctors from the military.”

“A very small number out of the over 6000 people who’ve been tested only looks like 44 people currently got reinfected,” Srinivasan explains. “The number of people referred to here is from a study done in England. The immunity to the virus is related to the British Oxford vaccine. The Moderna company’s (US company) vaccine might give protection for maybe a year. So then you have to worry about it after that. Because of this New Mutants train sets come out of England now already in the U.S. and they expect prediction is by April that it is going to pick up. So I think we won’t be able to stop wearing masks and physical distancing until we reach a high level of vaccinations so we have some herd immunity developed in the population.”

Now, vaccinations are out for people, which is good news for society. Yet, right now the nation is still at the early stages of vaccinations, many are still not vaccinated yet. In addition, there are new mutated Covid out there now, with a greater spreading rate. Masks and social distancing are still necessary in order to keep us all safe.