Ambulances placed on alert while Los Angeles hospitals flooded by COVID-19 patients

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 5 (Reuters) – Los Angeles health officials told early respondents to stop bringing adult patients who cannot be resuscitated for treatment in hospitals, citing a lack of beds and medical staff, as the latest wave COVID-19 threatened to dominate the city’s health systems.

The orders, issued on Monday night and taking effect immediately, marked a further escalation of measures taken across the country by state and local authorities due to the alarming increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.

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

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

California, the most populous state in the United States, was hit particularly hard by the latest rise in coronavirus, which some public health officials attribute to Thanksgiving holidays in November. Los Angeles is one of two counties that report a lack of beds in intensive care units.

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

Los Angeles County EMS director Cathy Chidester called the situation a “hidden disaster”, not entirely visible to the public in a county where COVID-19 patients were dying last week at a 10-minute rate.

In some cases, ambulances were forced to wait several hours to unload patients, causing delays throughout the county’s emergency response system.

The United States reported a total of 20.8 million cases and 355,000 deaths from COVID-19. A record 129,000 patients with COVID-19 were in hospitals on Tuesday.

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

Federal health officials said on Monday that more than two-thirds of the 15 million coronavirus vaccines manufactured by Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc and shipped within the United States still need to be administered.

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

The governors of New York and Florida said they would penalize hospitals that do not dispense injections quickly.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told a news conference on Tuesday. “If a hospital has already laid off all of its healthcare professionals, that’s fine, let’s get the supply back and go to the essential workers.”

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

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