Some California hospitals postpone surgeries, warn of rationed care amid COVID-19
Luke Money and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times
Dec. 28, 2020
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LOS ANGELES Kaiser Permanente is postponing non-urgent and elective surgeries and procedures throughout California as its hospitals like health care systems statewide continue to reel from an overwhelming onslaught of critically ill COVID-19 patients.
The pause will remain in effect through Jan. 10 in Kaiser’s Southern California region, and Jan. 4 in Northern California, according to statements from the health care consortium.
In Southern California, Kaiser is also not scheduling any new elective surgeries through the end of January.
The county could top 10,000 total COVID-19 deaths in a matter of days.
Hospitals are so inundated that they’ve resorted to placing patients in conference rooms or gift shops. Some are contending with aging and insufficient infrastructure that threatens to interrupt the flow of life-saving oxygen.
New daily case counts, though not climbing exponentially as they were earlier in the surge, remain distressingly high.
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On Christmas Eve, 140 people died from COVID-19 countywide an average of one fatality every 10 minutes, according to data compiled by The Times.
“These are figures that can’t be normalized,” county Supervisor Hilda Solis said during a briefing Monday. “Just like the sound of ambulance sirens, we can’t tune this out.”
In Covid-19 ravaged California on Christmas Day, remaining ICU capacity for the first time fell to zero across the entire state. Some counties, like Los Angeles and Orange County have been at 0% for over a week, but the state at large has recently floated between 1 and 3%. The drop is likely due to
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The use of a standardized tool for assessing the risk of serious outcomes in patients with chest pain was associated with women at high risk receiving comparable care to men, according to new research published in the
Annals of Emergency Medicine. Care received by women at low and intermediate risk was consistent with current clinical recommendations. Men received more stress testing and were more likely to be hospitalized than women.
The researchers goal in this study was to look at gender disparities after developing and implementing a standardized approach to cardiac care for patients in 2016, using the HEART score. The HEART score, which stands for history, electrocardiogram, age, risk factors, and troponin level, is used to determine risk for adults with suspected acute coronary syndrome and based on that risk informs clinical decisions and standard care recommendations.