California National Guard medical corps pitches in to help struggling hospitals

Each team consists of about six to 10 medical corps members, led by a physician or a nurse. Some facilities, like El Centro Regional Medical Center in Imperial County, have two teams.

The Guard has dispatched medical help since the start of the pandemic, but the need is now greater, with hospitals reaching a breaking point from an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases.

Last week, nine National Guard medical corps members arrived at Riverside Community Hospital, where there are more intensive care patients than beds. Staffers have converted a cafeteria into an overflow room and may expand to other areas.

As of Tuesday, the hospital was caring for 237 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 — the most in the county...

The troops’ duties included offloading patients from ambulances and serving as an extra pair of hands for nurses.

Wednesday was their last day. They will now go to another medical facility, perhaps one with fewer resources.

Since the pandemic started, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services has dispatched just over 1,200 medical personnel to facilities across the state, including 154 from the Guard...

The state is working to deploy more supplemental health workers in the next few weeks.

Projections show that things will only get worse at the hospital over the next 30 days, she said. About nine travel nurses are coming on board now, with plans to bring on 20 more over the next few weeks. They will supplement an overworked staff, some of whom have come down with the virus themselves.

The hospital may also convert an empty wing to a ward for less severely ill patients. Desouza-Van Blaricum described the wing as “an inside tent,” with cement floors, air conditioning and heat but no ceiling.

“Colds” would be by far the most numerous of the pathogens you list, and with over 200 possible viruses to choose from, and in far greater aggregate numbers than COVID-19*, testing to confirm colds cases would be impossible.

*Back in Sept., my teenage daughter brought home a “bug”, and my wife and I got it too. Early on the symptoms were “COVID-19-like” enough, and we have some at risk family members normally in contact, that the 3 of us all got tested. At least at that time and testing location, as I understood it, one had to either have symptoms, or, exposure to someone who had tested positive AND a risk factor (oneself’s or a person close to oneself) to be tested, or be a caregiver / “frontline” worker. However, most frontline workers and such were tested through their employers, one way or another, not at this test site. I asked the young lady we handed our filled out paperwork to how many people being tested said they were symptomatic: She characterized it as “most”.

We all tested negative, but my daughter got fairly sick, my wife less so, and I was pretty well clobbered for a day and a half, then felt better but took a long time to get rid of the chest cough.

A low estimate of “most”, it seems to me, would be around 60%. Disallowing ALL the other 40% entirely, and with positivity rates for COVID-19 in this area hovering around 10% for some time now, that leaves us to conclude approx. 50% of the tests were of people at the time symptomatic of “something” on your list, mostly colds.

One can argue this 50% is too high, however, we have not yet added in all cases of colds (etc.) that are very mildly symptomatic, asymptomatic, or the person simply did not get tested for whatever reason. So, I’ll run with that 50%. Multiply that by tests given to date = 0.5 x 251,765,894 (per Worldometers) = 125,882,947 people tested with symptoms of “something”, but the test indicated it was not COVID-19.

This would indicate colds are down in numbers, most likely due to COVID mitigation (which BTW should really crash flu numbers), and we are lacking Jan. and Feb. numbers (and most of March and April, really), but, significant numbers of colds are certainly still around.

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