“When you run out of capacity, doctors and bioethicists in these hospitals will have to decide which patients are salvageable – possibly salvable – and which patients are not,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, medical analyst at CNN, explains.
The increase in cases will put the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles in a position to need care needs, said Dr. CEO Elaine Batchlor said Monday.
“If we continue to see an increase in the number of Covid patients, we could be forced to do something that we as health professionals all just resent, even think about,” Batchlor told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin.
At Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California, nurses who normally care for one or two patients now take three or four, Drs. Kimberly Shriner, a specialist in infectious diseases, told CNN on Sunday.
“We have a limited number of fans, we have a limited number of ICU beds,” Shriner explained, adding that a team, including a bioethicist, a community member, a doctor, a nurse, and ” an administrative leader, will decide how to divide the resources. if it comes down to it.
“If you do not have respirators, you do not have nurses to care for patients, you do not have ICU beds, we will have to have these terrible discussions with families, therefore people have to stay at home, and when they go out, they have to wearing a mask, ‘Reiner said.
Battlefield triage techniques
The Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital will not turn patients away, Batchlor said, but staff may have to use techniques used in the war.
“We use what are called in the battlefield triage techniques, which assess the needs and prognosis of each person and the use of scarce resources in patients who are likely to benefit from it,” she said.
Resources are already being used in unconventional ways to accommodate the boom.
“Our staff has been incredibly skilled and flexible in accommodating increasing numbers of patients, so as you have heard, we have five tents outside the hospital,” Batchlor said. “We have patients in our conference room, in our chapel.”
Many gurneys are taken to the gift shop, she said.
While Batchlor has not specified how many new patients have Covid-19, the increase in their numbers puts stress on all care.
Christina Ghaly, director of health services in LA County, said some hospitals see patients who are still on ambulances.
“The patients are being cared for in the ambulance and treated as if they were part of the Emergency Bay,” Ghaly said.
US must increase vaccines, says expert
To date, about 2.1 million doses of vaccine have been administered in the U.S. and more than 11.4 million doses have been distributed since Monday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Another 4.7 million will be distributed by the end of the week, said Assistant Secretary of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir. That would put the total at more than 15.5 million doses “in the hands of the states”.
With doses on the way to state leaders, New Jersey expects to vaccinate about 31,000 long-term caregivers by the end of the week, Gov. Phil Murphy told a news conference Monday.
“With each passing day, our vaccination program is getting a little bigger and a lot stronger,” Murphy told reporters. “With the new year, we look forward to the opening of our six vaccination mega-sites and the further expansion of our vaccination efforts, and the continued movement by each priority group.”
Despite these developments, dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said Monday that the U.S. is lagging behind countries like Israel and Canada in the pace of vaccination efforts.
“We really need to push it,” he said. “Things are in crisis.”
Producers like Pfizer have millions of doses waiting to be awarded, he said, attributing the problem in part to the federal government failing to carry out their administration after doses were given to states.
“There is a lot of work to be done to get the vaccine from the state into the arms of people, and we needed a clearer set of plans than we had about it,” he told Jim Acosta, CNN.
Restrictions in California are likely to expand
Los Ferry, which has already been hit hard by the effects of the coronavirus, has reported nearly 100,000 new cases in the past week, LA County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said.
“The sad reality is that all indicators show us that our situation can only get worse if we start in 2021,” Ferrer said.
Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley had a local home order that would expire Monday. But based on current trends and the ICU capacity in the regions falling to 0%, the California government, Gavin Newsom, has announced that the order is likely to be extended.
The state on Monday added 33,170 new cases of the coronavirus and 64 additional deaths. Newsom warned that the slightly lower number of deaths was due to a backlog in reporting over the weekend.
The Minister of Health and Human Services in California, dr. Mark Ghaly, will use Monday’s final data to announce projections based on a four-week period on Tuesday, Newsom said.
California has reported more than 2.1 million cases of coronavirus and more than 24,000 deaths since the pandemic began.
CNN’s Lauren Mascarenhas, Virginia Langmaid, Paul Vercammen, Artemis Moshtaghian, Taylor Romine, John Bonifield, Naomi Thomas, Deidre McPhillips, Jenn Selva, Sarah Moon, Steve Almasy and Holly Yan contributed to this report.