LOS ANGELES _ The wave started in early March. The novel coronavirus was spreading across Los Angeles County, and local hospitals were unprepared.
Public health officials feared the worst. The news from Italy and New York _ the mass graves and morgue trucks _ was clear. They needed more beds.
So they planned.
The hospital ship Mercy sailed to San Pedro to treat the uninfected sick or injured. The Los Angeles Convention Center was prepped as a field hospital, and the St. Vincent Medical Center reopened.
The facility had closed in January, a victim of Verity Health System's long bankruptcy. Lying just west of downtown Los Angeles, the sprawling campus was deserted, doors locked, 366 beds empty, with the virus creeping through the city.
On March 19, Dr. Jamie Taylor got a phone call.
The state was negotiating with Verity to lease the property, and her longtime colleague Dr. Anand Annamalai was putting together "a SEAL team dedicated to COVID."
St. Vincent was to be known as the Los Angeles Surge Hospital, or LASH. Would she be interested in opening an intensive care unit for COVID-19 patients?
Taylor, 43 and a veteran of ICUs in California, New Jersey and New York, had experience treating severely ill COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Culver City. But that wasn't the only reason she was being asked.
She and Annamalai had worked together at St. Vincent for almost two years starting a liver transplant and oncology program, which ended in November when Verity decided to sell the property. (Five months later, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the medical center from Verity for $135 million. Soon-Shiong also owns the Los Angeles Times.)
"Our swan song (at St. Vincent) had a bitter taste," Taylor said. "It left all of us with a big hole in our stomachs about what was happening."
She now had an opportunity to chase that bitterness with something sweeter. The hospital that could not pay its bills had carte blanche to fight this new disease.
Within days of Annamalai's call, the state and Verity signed a six-month, $16 million lease. Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health would help set up the facility and offer oversight and guidance once it was up and running. VEP Health care would provide physician services, and Annamalai, Taylor and nearly 35 other doctors signed up.
By the time LASH closed on May 22, it would serve some of the poorest, sickest people in Los Angeles County and shore up the county's patchy hospital system. It would cost millions, last 39 days and treat 64 patients.
Created from scratch, this pop-up hospital brought hope to patients and families, and for its doctors and medical staff, it represented a rare opportunity to create their own health care system and practice medicine unconstrained by medical corporations and insurance companies.
"LASH," Annamalai said, "was a clinically led socialistic system."
