As in much of the nation, Orange County continues to set records for daily new coronavirus infections, with the OC Health Care Agency on Friday reporting 6,428 new cases and nearly 20% of tests coming back positive.

While hospital wards and intensive care units aren’t as slammed, staffing shortages and people jamming emergency rooms – some of whom are only seeking a COVID-19 test – have led to long wait times for ambulances dropping off patients.

“Our hospitals are full and the ambulance drop-off times are high,” averaging 52 minutes for paramedics to get a patient off their gurney, OC Deputy Health Officer Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong told media in a phone briefing Friday.

“All hospitals are seeing the influx of this current surge.”

Dr. Jim Keany, associate director of the emergency department at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, said the goal is to unload patients from ambulances within 30 minutes, and “we’re definitely at times exceeding the 30 minutes to get that ambulance back out on the road” – which means it’s not available to go to another emergency.

County Emergency Medical Services officials have forbidden busy hospitals from sending ambulances on to other facilities, a rare event that until the pandemic, had not occurred in recent memory.

Although daily new infections have surpassed the peak from the winter wave of late 2020 – when daily new cases never broke 5,000 – vaccinations are helping prevent serious illness so many people don’t need hospital care. The main jam-up in the medical system is in emergency departments, where frustrated hospital officials say some people with mild or no COVID-19 symptoms are arriving in the hope of getting a test.

Most testing clinics are booked at least several days out, and sudden demand has made rapid home tests difficult to come by.

Federal law requires hospitals to assess everyone who comes in to see if they require emergency care, so anyone who doesn’t need to be there is clogging up the system, Keany said.

“Just by showing up to the ER, you’ve created a burden that we’re required to meet,” he said. “If you don’t have an emergency, don’t show up to the emergency room.”

Chinsio-Kwong said people can still request free saliva test kits from the county that should arrive to their home in a day or two, and results once they mail it back to the lab should be available within three days.

As of Friday, OC Health Care Agency statistics showed 779 people hospitalized with COVID-19, including 122 patients in ICUs. That’s fewer than at the height of the winter 2020 surge, when hospitalizations surpassed 2,000 patients.

And, coronavirus deaths, while they usually lag behind new cases by several weeks and their reporting can take time to reach officials, remain quite low. Three additional deaths were reported Friday, as compared with a year ago, when as many as 60 or 70 deaths were occurring per day.

Chinsio-Kwong said some OC hospitals have again put up field tents to handle the influx of patients, but hospital beds remain available, as do ventilators.

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At Keany’s hospital, the tents are up, but they’re being used as a visitor waiting area because the facility doesn’t have enough staff to put patients in them, he said.

Noting that the rate of new cases here doubled in the last seven days, Keany said it’s hard to tell when the current wave may start to subside. And while it hasn’t been as hard on some parts of the medical system as the winter 2020 surge, it’s been crushing emergency departments.

“We don’t know where that peak’s going to end,” he said. “It’s going to break us all, if it doesn’t end soon.”