Ambulances are on their guard as hospitals in Los Angeles are flooded with COVID-19 patients

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 5 (Reuters) – Los Angeles health officials have said the first response is to stop bringing adult patients who could not be brought back to hospital as a result of the resuscitation, citing a shortage of beds and medical staff, as the latest COVID-19 surge threatens to overwhelm. the city’s healthcare systems.

The orders, which were issued late Monday and are effective immediately, indicated a further increase in the measures taken by state and local officials due to worrying increases in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

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

Reference 814 refers to the province’s policy of determining and pronouncing death in 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 coronavirus outbreak that some public health officials attribute to Thanksgiving holiday gatherings in November. Los Angeles is one of two provinces that are reporting a shortage of beds for intensive care units.

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

The director of the EMS, Los Angeles County, Cathy Chidester, called the situation a “hidden disaster”, which is not clearly visible to the public in a country where COVID-19 patients died last week at a rate of very ten minutes not.

Ambulances were in some cases forced to wait several hours to drop off patients, causing delays in the country’s emergency response system.

The United States reported a total of 20.8 million cases and 355.00 COVID-19 deaths. A record 129,000 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals as of Tuesday.

The deteriorating situation has put increasing pressure on government officials and local officials to expedite the distribution of the two vaccines approved for emergency use to protect the coronavirus.

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

But some health professionals have started getting their second shot of the Pfizer vaccine this week. Both vaccines require two doses of three to four weeks apart.

The governors of New York and Florida have said they will punish hospitals that do not hand out shots quickly.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told a news conference on Tuesday. “If a hospital has done all their health workers well, we will take back the stock and go to essential workers.”

The US government is considering halving the doses of Moderna’s vaccine to free up provision for more vaccinations.

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