2021-01-06 10:05:38 GMT2021-01-06 18:05:38(Beijing Time) Xinhua English
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 5 (Xinhua) As local hospitals are overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Agency has issued directives, saying ambulances should not transport patients to hospital if they have virtually no chance of surviving, CBS news channel reported Tuesday.
Patients likely with such treatment include those whose heartbeat and breathing have stopped and who couldn t be resuscitated by paramedics, said a memo signed by Marianne Gausche-Hill, the agency s medical director, and issued on Monday.
Due to the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on EMS and 911 Receiving Hospitals, adult patients in blunt traumatic and nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest shall not be transported if return of spontaneous circulation is not achieved in the field, read the memo posted online.
2021-01-06 16:20:58 GMT2021-01-07 00:20:58(Beijing Time) Sina English
AFP
County of Los Angeles paramedics load a potential COVID-19 patient in the ambulance before transporting him to a hospital in Hawthorne, California as a family walks by on December 29, 2020.
Los Angeles health officials have told first responders to stop bringing adult patients who cannot be resuscitated to hospitals, citing a shortage of beds and staff as the latest COVID-19 surge threatened to overwhelm health care systems in the second-largest US city.
The order issued late on Monday and became effective immediately, marking an escalation of measures being taken by state and local officials in the United States in the face of alarming rise in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
Ambulances waiting at hospitals for six hours
In Los Angeles County, emergency rooms are so crowded that some ambulances have been forced to wait as long as six hours to offload patients, said Cathy Chidester, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency. Some patients arriving by ambulance are asked to sit in the emergency department lobby so the ambulance can depart.
California is also desperately seeking more medical staff from overseas, perhaps from as far away as Australia, while opening field hospitals to care for non-ICU patients in places such as Costa Mesa, Porterville, Sacramento and Imperial; other facilities are on standby status in Riverside, Richmond, Fresno, San Diego and San Francisco.
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Hospitals’ Desperate Measures
With intensive care units in Southern California and the Central Valley lurching perilously close to full capacity, officials are turning to increasingly desperate measures to prevent the state’s
coronavirus surge from killing even more patients.
Hospitalizations are continuing to rise at unprecedented levels, and officials have limited options for boosting capacity. Among the tools: canceling scheduled surgeries; keeping critically ill patients in emergency rooms; sending ICU patients into step-down units earlier; training nurses from elsewhere in hospitals to help with intensive care; and increasing the numbers of patients an ICU nurse can care for.