LOS ANGELES (AP) – It’s crowded in the back of an ambulance.
Two emergency medical technicians, a patient, a gurney – and an invisible and unwelcome passenger are hiding in the air.
For EMT Thomas Hong and Joshua Hamd, the coronavirus is constantly close. During a 24-hour shift in Orange County, California, the Covid-19 has become their biggest threat, with them riding from 911 calls to 911 calls from patient to patient.
In Southern California he and other EMTs, paramedics and 911 dispatchers have been pushed to the front lines of the National Epidemic Center. They are bored to help people in need as hospitals are bursting with rush of patients after the holidays, ambulance beds are stuck waiting outside hospitals for hours until they are available, oxygen tanks are vaguely in short supply and vaccine rollout has slowed.
EMTs and paramedics always deal with life and death – they make split-second decisions about patient care, which hospital run to take, the best and quickest way to save someone – and now they are just a breath away from becoming a patient themselves. .
They raise the robe, put on the mask and glove up, “but you can only be so safe,” Hammond said. “We don’t have the luxury of being feet away from the patient.”
Between EVTs and paramedics – especially those hired by private companies – it is difficult to find Covid-19 cases and death statistics. They are considered essential health care workers but rarely receive the salaries and protections paid to doctors and nurses.
Emergency Ambulance Service Inc., a private ambulance company based in Hammond and Hoang Southern California. Works for They, like many people, have many long-term goals of becoming the first responders to serve their communities.
Hoang attends a nursing school. Hammond is a test of being a paramedic. Both were called to life in the medical field after the traumatic experiences: Hammond had to call 911 after his mother had an allergic reaction, and Hong witnessed a car crash into a young cyclist.
Yet as the risks and risks of Kovid-19 infection increase, they wonder: Is it worth risking your life and the lives of your loved ones at home – a small salary and a dream?
25. Hammond said, “Besides the fact that I really ‘want to help people’, it’s hard to justify it.”
For now, yes.
“I want to do my part to help people improve in a sense,” said Hoang, 29.
And so their day starts at 7am
Wearing masks, Hoang and Hammond clean their ambulances and equipment, erasing every surface, even if the next crew already scrubs it off. They take no chances during their long shift covering the Orange Range County city of Placenta.
911 calls come with limited information: broken bones, chest pain, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, fever. Every patient is a potential carrier of coronavirus, whether they know it or not.
Sometimes, people know they are infected and call 911 dispatchers before EMTs arrive. At other times, the symptoms themselves – fever, shortness of breath – indicate a possible case. But Hammond remembers a woman suffering from hip pain who didn’t tell him or her partner about his coronavirus diagnosis.
He only discovered it later, saying it reinforced the importance of treating each patient as if they had tested positive.
“It was definitely a call where we learned a lot,” Hammond said.
Unlike doctors and nurses, first responders must go indoors. They go to the hot zone where everyone in the house is sick, where the virus is in the air. They lift static patients over the gurney, their masked faces separated by just inches.
They attend hospitals surrounded by sick people, sometimes having to wait just hours before a patient is admitted. When the next 911 call comes and they will do it all over again.
“We don’t know the final result,” Hoang said. “We only know the beginning of the hospital.”
Then there are those who direct EMT where it should go. In Los Angeles County, 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of Hong and Hammond, three young women, recently speaking in headsets with clear, clipped voices, gathered other ambulance crews around the area from the mountains to the sea. .
Ashley Cortez, Adrianna Moreno and Jaime work on a 12-hour shift as a dispatch to Care Ambulance Service Inc. If EMTO is the front line, these women are scouts.
They play chess with the ambulance all day. When a hospital is stuck for eight, 10 or 12 hours, dispatchers must relocate others to cover its area. When the EMT reports a positive COVID-19 test, the dispatch must find a way to cover ambulance calls if the entire crew must be isolated. When there are many coronavirus patients in a household who need two ambulances, dispatchers have to plug a hole.
Their biggest danger is called “level zero” when there is no ambulance left to send them there in an emergency. In Los Angeles County, one of the hardest-hit counties in the country during the epidemic, fear becomes a regular reality.
For 28-year-old Moreno, anxiety starts the night before his shift.
He said, “I’m lying there and I know I’m going to come in, and I know I don’t have a unit to run these calls.”
Over the Christmas weekend, the screenwriter looked at his screen as a call after call call – with no ambulance available. Typically, one takes 30 seconds to send. That week, it took 15 minutes. This was just before the ambulance began to stay out of hospitals for hours.
“I was just in disbelief,” Cortez, 26, said.
Not much can be dispatched. They see those screens. They hear the radio rumbling. They rearrange the crew to cover as much area as possible. And they wonder what awaits fresh horror in a world plagued by viruses, where the risks are many and the ambulance very few.
“If something happened to my daughter, what would happen and there was no one to send for her?”
