California is soaring with COVID-19 cases and death, and now the state’s Central Valley (where I reside) is quickly going to shitsville with ICU-bed capacity dropping like a rock (h/t BJ):

Coronavirus is spreading like a weed and the hospitals are running out of beds for the sickest patients in California's agricultural heartland. https://t.co/SndnxQtFQa

— AP West Region (@APWestRegion) December 12, 2020

We’re in a world of hurt — from the LA Times this morning:

The last time Dr. Eyad Almasri had a day off was in November, when he was infected with COVID-19.
His symptoms were not life-threatening, but it crushed him, he said, that he couldn’t be with his patients for 10 days.

A pulmonologist with the Fresno campus of UC San Francisco,
Almasri works in the intensive care unit at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno — so packed with COVID-19 patients that the hospital has had to create makeshift isolation wards, including one in a hallway.
Exhausted staff, working long hours seven days a week, rarely take off their protective gear because the entire area is the “dirty zone” — a phrase Almasri detests.
With so many patients, there is no time for breaks anyway.

The story was similar this week in much of the San Joaquin Valley, where hospitals were crowded with COVID-19 patients. As of noon Saturday, availability of ICU beds in the region was zero.
Fresno, a metro area with more than 1 million people, hit that dubious marker two days earlier.

“There is no help on the way,” Almasri said Thursday.
“I can’t tell you how scared people are, and I can’t even sit there and hold their hands. There are so many others waiting.”

Muzzle-headed idiots, full of misinformation are also here in the Central Valley, too, despite the dying:

Almasri, the doctor in Fresno, is well aware of the misinformation campaigns and politicization around the pandemic.
He sees it when he returns to his neighborhood.

“My own neighbor told me they thought COVID wasn’t real — a scam for hospitals to get money from the government,” he said.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m there every day. I’ve seen people die.’”
…
In the field for 25 years, he has never been more proud to be a doctor, he said.
Despite the odds, Almasri and his team have been able to help the same percentage of patients overcome COVID-19 as those in better-served areas.

“We’re saving lives,” he said.
“We just can’t save everyone at once.”

He said if he could tell people anything about what is happening at the hospital, it would be, “Help us. Wear a mask.”

On the topic of masks, this insane California-based feature from The Washington Post on Friday — no wonder we be fucked:

The pale blue is easy to spot among the dry-brown reeds.

People walk here along the northern coast of the San Francisco Bay, crowding a path that bends to the contour of the shore. At the small pebble beach near a park called Blackies Pasture, a surgical mask is tangled in the marsh at the edge of the Bay.
A little farther on is another, then another on the other side of the path, waiting to be blown into the sea.

“I mean this is a high-wealth area and even here you see it,” said Peter Ottesen, a fit 74-year-old tossing the ball to his black lab, Addie, on a recent clear morning.
“It’s now like cigarette butts or anything else. You see it on the sides of the path, the sides of the road, and if you don’t see it, you are not looking.”

There is the economic crash, the education gap, the depression of solitary life.
Now another unwelcome and potentially enduring side effect of the coronavirus pandemic has emerged: the masks, gloves, disinfectant wipes and other items of “personal protective equipment” meant to save lives are also polluting the environment.

A statewide beach-area clean-up day last September, held by the California Coastal Commission, pulled 70,000 pounds of garbage from parks, creeks, beaches and other public areas, with 75-percent of the shit containing plastic, and surprise, surprise, masks, gloves and other personal protective items ranked 12th out of the 50 categories of recovered trash: ‘“This should not be on the ground in the first place, it should be on your face,” said Eben Schwartz, who directs the Coastal Commission’s marine debris program.‘

Even with the vaccine roll-out, we’ve a dreadful row to hoe…

(Illustration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)‘ found here).