Kaiser is postponing all elective and non-urgent surgeries at Northern California facilities due to the surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. They plan to reschedule services as soon as feasible while making sure patients and staff stay safe.
As of now, University of California San Francisco Medical Center is not cancelling elective procedures, but the situation could change.
Stanford Health is also going ahead with elective procedures that do no require a hospital bed, while Kaiser Permanente is delaying many as a response to California s COVID-19 surge. We re still doing surgeries, for instance, with cancer, with urgent procedures. We re doing emergent procedures that need to be done, said Dr. Michael Vollmer with Kaiser Permanente, But things that can be delayed, even for a week or two, until we can get this surge under control in the state.
NewsHour Weekend’s Connie Kargbo joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss some of her most impactful work from 2020: necessary ‘elective’ surgeries being suspended during the pandemic due to hospital overflow; vaccine hesitancy; and how aging caregivers, at risk for COVID, ask themselves who will care for my diasbled loved one when I’m no longer around?
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Michael Hill:
In another of our year-end interviews, Hari Sreenivasan spoke with NewsHour Weekend producer Connie Kargbo on some of the stories she produced for Christopher Booker as the coronavirus dominated the news cycle.
Hari Sreenivasan:
Connie, one of the first things that we noticed as hospitals in New York and other places began to be overwhelmed by COVID patients is that elective surgeries were shutting down. And you took a look at the fact that, well, elective is really just in the name, that some of these surgeries are pretty necessary.