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A COVID-19 ICU at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in the Willowbrook neighborhood of Los Angeles. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Southern California's COVID outbreak is in a terrible place, and hospitals haven't even been hit with a wave of potential infections from Christmas and New Year's.
The big picture: Hospitalizations have stabilized, but public health officials say that's just from infections linked to Thanksgiving, the L.A. Times reports.
- More than one-third of the 10 million people in Los Angeles County are believed to have been infected with COVID.
- Authorities are urging essential workers and people who run errands to wear masks when they're at home.
- Officials hope the return of stay-at-home orders late last year will stem the tide.
Many mortuaries have had to turn away grieving families because they're at capacity, the owner of Los Angeles Funeral Service told ABC News.
- The L.A. County coroner has been holding some bodies to free up mortuary capacity. Orange County brought in refrigerated trucks.
Between the lines: The advice of "stay home" doesn't work for essential workers and people who can't work from their couches.
- "Los Angeles has small family housing with lots of people in them. It’s hard to be a gardener working from home," epidemiologist George Rutherford told NBC News.
The bottom line: Even a good-case scenario for Christmas and New Year's infections would leave hospitals in dire straits for the next month, said Christina Ghaly, the L.A. County director of health services.
Go deeper: America is tuning out coronavirus at its peak destruction