Los Angeles County hospitals are so inundated, officials said they’re just trying to provide the best care they can for the people who need it.
Hospitals across Los Angeles County have become so slammed with patients in recent weeks that county officials have instructed ambulances not to transport patients to the hospital with virtually no chance of survival and to preserve supplemental oxygen supplies by only administering it to people who desperately need it.
Overloaded hospitals have meant that ambulances are waiting to off-load patients at times for as long as six to eight hours. On any given day over the past week, 70 to 90% of L.A. County hospitals were closed to ambulances for advanced life support treatment. And a handful of other hospitals declared “internal disasters,” turning away ambulances of all kind to reduce the pressures on staff.
The L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Agency issued a directive Monday detailing the decision.
“Given the acute need to conserve oxygen, effective immediately, EMS should only administer supplemental oxygen to patients with oxygen saturation below 90%,” the directive said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The directive was made on the same day the county said 7,697 patients were hospitalized with the virus. Of those, at least 21% are in intensive care units. When the recent surge began, in early-November, there were about 791 people hospitalized with COVID-19.
Since the memo began circulating online, many people have questioned whether first responders would deny taking stroke and heart attack patients to the hospital because of the coronavirus surge.
The medical director of L.A. County’s Emergency Services Agency, Dr. Marianne Gausche-Hill, told CBS News that officials continue to do all they can to save patients’ lives at the scene and the hospital, as they always have.
“We are not abandoning resuscitation,” Gausche-Hill said. “We are absolutely doing best practice resuscitation and that is do it in the field, do it right away… What we’re asking is that — which is slightly different than before — is that we are emphasizing the fact that transporting these patients arrested leads to very poor outcomes. We knew that already and we just don’t want to impact our hospitals.”
Treating heart attack and stroke patients at the scene instead of on the way to the hospitals can increase chances of survival, Gausche-Hill said.
Los Angeles County remains the worst-hit county in the U.S. for both confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths from the disease. Johns Hopkins University listed more than 818,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 10,700 deaths from complications from the virus in Los Angeles County by late Monday.
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Los Angeles had one of the poorest compliance rates in the US for social distancing and mask wearing. Restaurants and bars operated almost as normal. The politicians took too long to lock down again. And the local Restaurant Association got a judge to rule against the regulations. The result was all too predictable.