Top line
If North Texas begins to run out of ICU beds, doctors may need to consider the status of coronavirus vaccination as a factor in which priority care is given, a situation that U.S. officials say. health they hope to avoid, but concern is increasingly likely; the assumption that they are more likely to survive.
Doctors in the Dallas area have been told that vaccination status against Covid can be used as a triage. … [+]
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Key factors
Members of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guide working group held a meeting last week on the worsening Covid crisis in the area and discussed the possibility that doctors needed to use the state Covid vaccination to prioritize care in extreme scenarios.
A spokesman for the working group said Forbes that doctors at the meeting noted that unvaccinated Covid patients suffered worse outcomes, prompting an internal note to be sent to members of the working group, which provides guidance for doctors in the Dallas area, for inform physicians that they could consider vaccination status when deciding who to care for, if necessary.
This was stated by Dr. Mark Casanova, spokesman for the working group Forbes that other factors, such as pre-existing conditions, will become effective in situations where patients should be given priority for care and non-vaccination status will not be used as an “exclusion criterion”.
But if all things being equal between two patients suffering from Covid-19, anyone who is vaccinated would be considered more likely to survive, Casanova said, meaning they would receive care first.
Crucial quote
“Our situation is bad and if the numbers continue in the direction they are going, there is realistic potential that triage guidelines will need to be used,” Casanova said in an interview.
Great number
80. Thus, according to the Texas State Department of Health Services, there are many beds available in the Dallas area. The population of the area is around 8.1 million.
Key background
Covid’s new cases and hospitalizations are firing in Texas with no signs of slowing down. As of Wednesday, there were 12,402 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in Texas, a figure that is rapidly approaching the maximum pandemic of just over 14,000 in January. Texas is one of several southern states where the delta variant has led to an uncontrolled increase in Covid cases, which has caused devastating impacts on health systems. In Mississippi, health officials opted to open a field hospital in a parking garage to relieve stress from regular medical facilities, while Alabama now has more patients in need of intensive care than it can take. number of beds designated in the ICU. And on Wednesday afternoon, officials in Mobile, Alabama, which has a population of nearly 200,000, decided that ambulances could no longer transport people to the hospital as emergency rooms were crowded with Covid patients. Vaccination status does not appear to be used as a triage factor in these areas.
Tangent
Using the chances of survival to prioritize who received care was a distressing step taken by Italian doctors in the early days of the pandemic, when health systems were overwhelmed by the number of patients in need of treatment.
To read more
If North Texas runs out of hospital beds in the ICU, doctors may consider a patient’s vaccination status (The Dallas Morning News)
“Zero level of critical mass”: ambulances in Mobile, Alabama, stop taking people to hospitals in the middle of Covid Surge (Forbes)
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