San Diego has remained on Governor Newsom's coronavirus watchlist for several weeks now, but it seems like the county is still struggling to get some people and businesses to comply with the public health order. Chris Van Gorder, the president and CEO of Scripps Health says he's fed up with seeing people not following the rules.
Through the pandemic, 163 patients have died from COVID-19 at Scripps health facilities. More than 1100 people have been hospitalized at Scripps locations because of the coronavirus.
"Our doctors and our nurses have to pick up the phone and call family members and tell them that their loved ones died because people are not out there doing what they should be doing," Van Gorder said.
Van Gorder said he saw an influx in COVID-19 patients when the economy started reopening, but now that local leaders are re-instituting restrictions he's noticing that Scripps' numbers are declining.
"We made a mistake frankly by opening up too early and that caused us to spike back up again and now that we’ve re-instituted some of those regulations we are starting to see those numbers decline again," he said.
Van Gorder says every day the medical professionals at Scripps Health facilities are using about 30,000 pairs of gloves in their fight against the coronavirus.
"People say this is just like the flu, this isn’t the flu. First of all, people are dying a lot more from COVID-19 than they ever died from flu. And then the people who don’t die potentially have lifetime organ failure," Gorder said.
