California is already planning for escalating coronavirus infections in June ‘Phase 2’

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his top health official have talked for more than a week about California’s need for 50,000 more hospital beds, 10,000 more ventilators and tens of millions more masks to battle coronavirus.

On Wednesday, they revealed those numbers are just “Phase 1.”

“If you extrapolate that out… we’ll exceed that Phase 1 surge capacity of 50,000 (beds) somewhere in the middle part of May,” Newsom said at a Wednesday news conference.

At that point, the state’s need will begin to grow past 50,000 to 66,000 additional hospital beds to accommodate the projected surge of patients, the Democratic governor said. The state’s pre-coronavirus hospital capacity was 75,000 beds.

The governor said roughly 40 percent of the beds should be set up for patients needing intensive care.

A chart displayed at Newsom’s Wednesday news conference showed growth in infections growing beyond that.

The state’s stay-at-home order has bought California time to prepare, and national numbers released by President Donald Trump’s administration show the state is doing better than others at preventing the spread of infection. But the state is still scrambling to acquire the beds and ventilators needed for Phase 1.

Of the 10,000 ventilators Newsom says are needed, the state has obtained 4,252. Phase 2 projections say 30,000 ventilators could be required.

“There is simply not a purveyor of ventilators in the world that has not received a call directly from me or the team,” Newsom said. “We’ll keep at it. The whole point is to buy more time. As long as we’re at the lower end of that curve, that will give us more days, more weeks to find those additional ventilators.”

The governor said the numbers underscore the need to keep schools closed for the remainder of the academic year.

“With this new modeling, it seems, I think, self evident that we should not prepare to bring our children back into the school setting,” he said.

As of Wednesday, more than 1,800 people are hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, Newsom said. Roughly 774 are in intensive care.

Had the state done nothing, more than 700,000 very sick COVID-19 patients could have flooded California hospitals at once, nearly 10 times more than the system could handle, Newsom’s top health official Dr. Mark Ghaly said during the news conference.

The state has yet to fully identify the 50,000 beds for Phase 1, though Ghaly said it is on its way. For Phase 2, the University of California and California State University system both have identified more than 5,000 beds, Newsom said on Tuesday.

California is indeed flattening the curve, indicating that the state’s stay-at-home order is working as expected, Ghaly said, using the charts plotting projected infection spread to underscore his point.

“Throughout California, counties are doing an amazing job. People are doing an incredible job,” Ghaly said. He then pointed to the part of the graph where hospital capacity would be outstripped in mid-May, even with current restrictions.

“If we do what we are doing today,” he said, “we do cross this line.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 3:25 PM with the headline "California is already planning for escalating coronavirus infections in June ‘Phase 2’."