Its hard to grasp that the stories coming out of Los Angeles Countys COVID-19 outbreak are happening on American soil: patients dying in crowded hospital hallways, medical providers running out of oxygen canisters and dead bodies piling up with nowhere left to store them.

The county surpassed 10,000 coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, as well as its single-day record of COVID-19 deaths with 262 fatalities .

The horror stories doctors, nurses and other people on the front lines of the pandemic have shared with The Los Angeles Times and other local media outlets have revealed a community under siege.

Heres how bad the situation has become.

Hospitals are running out of oxygen and other critical tools

At least five hospitals across the county have declared internal disasters after running dangerously low on oxygen, which must be administered to COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe through their inflamed lungs.

Critically ill coronavirus patients need to receive about 10 times more oxygen per minute than the average patient sick with another disease, the Times reported. Between that and the overwhelming number of cases, aging hospitals simply dont have the infrastructure to deploy enough high-flow oxygen treatment.

Theyre not able to maintain the pressure in the pipe to maintain oxygen delivery at that high level of pressure thats required to be delivered through the high-flow oxygen delivery vehicles, Dr. Christina Ghaly, the countys Health Services director, told CNN on Tuesday. Because of that high flow through the pipes, sometimes its freezing in the pipes, and obviously if it freezes then you cant have a good flow of oxygen.