Pressure on Orange County’s hospitals eases after relentless winter surge

Pressure on Orange County’s hospitals eases after relentless winter surge

Whether hospitalizations will ever get as bad as they did in December and January is a matter of whether enough people can be vaccinated before COVID-19 has a chance to mutate into more contagious variants, said Dr. Shruti Gohil, associate medical director of epidemiology and infection prevention at UC Irvine Medical Center. “This is a race against time,” Gohil said. “If we do our job really well and get the vaccine blanketed out there, then we stand a chance to stomp this out to a level where we really can end this pandemic.”