Ambulances were put on alert when Los Angeles hospitals were flooded by COVID-19 patients

LOS ANGELES, Jan 5 (Reuters) – Los Angeles health officials have told first aiders to stop taking adult patients who cannot be resuscitated to hospitals for treatment, citing a lack of beds and medical staff as they ‘latest wave of COVID-19 threatened to overflow the city’s health systems.

The orders, issued Monday afternoon and effective immediately, led to a further escalation of measures taken across the country by state and local officials due to alarming increases in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

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

Reference 814 refers to the county’s policy for determining and pronouncing death on a patient who has not been transported to a hospital.

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

The state of about 40 million residents reported 72,911 cases of COVID-19 on Monday, a one-day record since the pandemic began.

Los Angeles County SME director Cathy Chidester has described the situation as a “hidden disaster,” which is not clearly visible to the public in a county where COVID-19 patients die last week at a rate of ten. minutes.

At times, 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 in hospitals as of Tuesday.

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

Federal health officials said Monday that more than two-thirds of the 15 million coronavirus vaccines manufactured by Pfizer Inc. and Modern Inc. and shipped to the United States have not yet been administered.

But some health workers began receiving their second shots of the Pfizer vaccine this week. Both vaccines require two doses of three or four weeks apart.

The governors of New York and Florida have said they would penalize hospitals for not dispensing shots quickly.

“It’s a matter of life or death,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told a news conference Tuesday. “If a hospital has done all its health workers, that’s fine, we’ll get that supply back and go to essential workers.”

The US government is considering halving the doses of Moderna’s vaccine to free up the supply of more vaccines.

But scientists at the National Institutes of Health and Modern Health said Tuesday it could take two months to study whether halving the doses would be effective. [nL1N2JG2A4}