Ambulances put on alert as Los Angeles hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients

LOS ANGELES, Jan.5 (Reuters) – Los Angeles health officials have told first responders to stop bringing adult patients who cannot be resuscitated to hospitals for treatment, citing a shortage of beds and medical staff, as the latest outbreak of COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm the city’s health systems.

The orders, issued late Monday and effective immediately, marked a further escalation in action taken nationally by state and local authorities amid the alarming increase in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

“Patients under full traumatic arrest who meet the current criteria of Ref 814 to determine death should not be resuscitated and should be declared dead at the scene and not transported,” said Marianne Gausche-Hill, medical director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency. in the directive.

Reference 814 refers to county policy on determining and pronouncing death in a patient who has not been taken to hospital.

California, the most populous U.S. state, has been hit particularly hard by the latest wave of coronavirus that some public health officials attribute to Thanksgiving holiday gatherings in November. Los Angeles is one of two counties to report a shortage of intensive care unit beds.

The state of some 40 million people reported 72,911 COVID-19 cases on Monday, a single-day record since the start of the pandemic.

Los Angeles County EMS Director Cathy Chidester called the situation a “hidden disaster”, not clearly visible to the public in a county where COVID-19 patients were dying last week at the rate of a very 10 minutes.

In some cases, ambulances have been forced to wait several hours to unload patients, causing delays throughout the county’s emergency response system.

The United States has reported a total of 20.8 million cases and 355.00 deaths from COVID-19. A record 129,000 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized on Tuesday.

The worsening situation has put increasing pressure on national and local authorities to speed up the distribution of the two vaccines approved for emergency use to protect against the coronavirus.

Federal health officials said on Monday that more than two-thirds of the 15 million coronavirus vaccines manufactured by Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc and shipped to the United States have yet to be administered.

But some healthcare workers started receiving their second injection of the Pfizer vaccine this week. Both vaccines require two doses three or four weeks apart.

The governors of New York and Florida have said they will penalize hospitals that fail to dispense injections quickly.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a press conference Tuesday. “If a hospital has done all of its health workers, fine, we’ll take that stock back and go to essential workers.”

The US government plans to halve Moderna vaccine doses to free up the supply for more vaccinations.

But scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna said on Tuesday it might take two months to study whether doses halved would be effective.[nL1N2JG2A4}[nL1N2JG2A4}[nL1N2JG2A4}[nL1N2JG2A4}