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“When capacity is exhausted, doctors and bioethicists at these hospitals will have to decide which patients can be saved (potentially saved) and which cannot,” said CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner.
A further spike in cases would put the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles in the position of needing to ration care, Executive Director Dr. Elaine Batchlor said Monday.
“If we continue to see an increase in the number of Covid patients, we may be forced to do something that as healthcare professionals we all really hate even having to think about,” Batchlor told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin.
At Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California, nurses who typically see one or two patients now see three or four, infectious disease specialist Dr. Kimberly Shriner told CNN Sunday.
“We have a limited number of ventilators, we have a limited number of ICU beds,” Shriner said, adding that a team that includes a bioethicist, a community member, a doctor, a nurse, and an administrative leader will decide how to divide those. means. if it comes to that.
“If you don’t have respirators, you don’t have nurses to take care of patients, you don’t have ICU beds, we will have to have these terrible discussions with families, that’s why people need to stay home and when they go out, they need to wear a mask,” he said. Reiner.
Battlefield Triage Techniques
Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital will not turn patients away, Batchlor said, but staff may have to employ techniques that have been used in warfare.
“We use what on the battlefield is called triage techniques, which is to do an assessment of the needs and prognosis of each person and use scarce resources with the patients who are most likely to benefit from them,” he said.
Resources are already being used in unconventional ways to accommodate the increase.
“Our staff has been incredibly skilled and flexible in accommodating an ever-increasing number of patients, so as you heard, we have five tents outside the hospital,” Batchlor said. “We have patients in our conference room, in our chapel.”
Many stretchers are brought to the gift shop, he said.
While Batchlor did not specify how many new patients have Covid-19, the increase in their number is putting emphasis on all of the care.
Los Angeles County Health Services Director Christina Ghaly said some hospitals are treating patients who are still in ambulances.
“Those patients are being seen and treated in the ambulance like it’s part of the ER bay,” Ghaly said.
Fauci: January could be worse than December
January’s coronavirus numbers could be worse than December because travel spiked during the holidays, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday.
I wish many hadn’t traveled, but those who did can still decide to limit the potential spread, restricting who they congregate with, he said.
“For those who have already traveled, what they should do now is try not to congregate with large numbers of people in social settings like dinner parties,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto. on Tuesday.
“Once you reach a large number of people at an indoor dinner, there is poor ventilation and air circulation, that’s when you get into trouble,” he said. “That’s what worries us: that in addition to the (current) increase, we are going to have an increase superimposed on that increase, which could make January even worse than December.”
Although the average number of new infections and daily deaths from Covid-19 in the US has declined in recent days, it is not far from record highs.
An average of 180,904 new infections were reported daily during the past week through Monday. The maximum average so far, 219,324, was established just 11 days ago.
The US averaged 2,210 new Covid-19 deaths daily for the past week through Monday, just six days after hitting the average high of 2,715 per day.
With hospitalizations now at a record high, deaths could rise again, as experts say increases in deaths generally follow increases in hospitalizations.
If the cases themselves rise with vacation travel, hospitalizations and deaths could rise further, experts say.
America needs to increase vaccines, says expert
So far, about 2.1 million doses of vaccines have been administered in the U.S. and more than 11.4 million doses have been distributed as of Monday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA
Another 4.7 million will be distributed before the weekend, said Admiral Brett Giroir, deputy secretary of health for the US Department of Health and Human Services. That would bring the total to more than 15.5 million doses “in the hands of the states “.
With doses reaching state leaders, New Jersey expects to vaccinate about 31,000 long-term care residents by the end of the week, Gov. Phil Murphy said at a news conference Monday.
“With each passing day, our vaccination program just gets a little bigger and a lot stronger,” Murphy told reporters. “In the New Year, we look forward to the opening of our six mega vaccination sites and further expansion of our vaccination efforts, and continued movement through each priority group.”
Despite these developments, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, said Monday that the United States is lagging behind countries like Israel and Canada in the pace of vaccination efforts.
“We really have to increase this,” he said. “Things are in crisis.”
Manufacturers like Pfizer have millions of doses waiting to be allocated, he said, attributing that problem in part to the federal government failing to comply with its administration after the doses are delivered to the states.
“There is a lot of work to get the state vaccine into the arms of the people, and we needed a clearer set of plans than we had in this regard,” he told CNN’s Jim Acosta.
CNN’s Naomi Thomas, Jason Hanna, Lauren Mascarenhas, Virginia Langmaid, Paul Vercammen, Artemis Moshtaghian, Taylor Romine, Greg Wallace, Deidre McPhillips, and Steve Almasy contributed to this report.
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