Pallbearers carry a coffin into a church for services. Photo: Krysja, via Shutterstock)COVID 19 is not only overwhelming California’s hospitals, it’s overwhelming cemeteries and funeral homes as well. Funeral directors across the state are being forced to tell grieving families that they have no more room and cannot serve them.
A medical researcher at work. (Photo: National Cancer Institute, via Wikimedia Commons.Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster were joined by Dr. Dean Blumberg, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, UC Davis School of Medicine and Acting Chief, Pediatric Infectious Disease Section, UC Davis Medical Center.
A hospital in Tustin with signs lauding health care workers. (Photo: BrianPham75, via Shutterstock)OPINION: The numbers grow scarier each day. Over the past week, California has topped more than 20,000 new cases of COVID-19 in a single day, with more than 8,000 people hospitalized due to the virus. Those volumes dwarf any seen in the past year, and the impact of get-togethers during Thanksgiving are not yet being felt, nor is the projected effect of the December and New Year’s holidays.
This week we posted four special editions of the Capitol Weekly Podcast, broadcasting the content from our September 17 conference on health care in the Golden State. We focused this year on the unprecedented public health emergency: COVID-19. Exactly six months and one day after the first Shelter-in-Place order, we examined the response to the crisis and looked at what comes next.
A potential voter fills out a voter registration form. (Photo: Rawpixel, com, via Shutterstock)California has now reached an historic high of over 21 million registered voters. The current PDI voter file, after a full refresh of county files, puts total voter registration at 21,086,077. As a share of eligible voters, this puts the state at 83%, a higher rate of registration than we have seen since the presidential election of 1940.
A suspect in custody, handcuffed by police. (Photo: Boyfare, via Shutterstock)Police response to mental-health calls often ends – again and again – in chaotic, noisy hospital emergency rooms, where staff is stretched thin, and a heart attack is likely to take precedence over someone in the throes of a mental-health crisis. “Traditionally, people would be dropped off at the ER, and the only option was to transfer them to a psychiatric facility,” says Dr. Scott Zeller, a nationally known emergency psychiatrist and former president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry.