My son is an EMT and told me this a few days ago. He told me he didn’t know if he could follow this order if faced with it. Most of his fellow EMTs would have a very hard time following this edict. My question-- are there going to be Bring Out Your Dead wheelbarrows?
I am really frightened.
No, they’ll be golf carts.
I’m not quite sure what this means. In my neck of the woods the EMTs don’t transport dead people. Either the ME does it if there is a follow up or they are released to the family to make arrangements with a funeral home.
EMTs don’t transfer dead people but they do work on cardiac arrest victims and others who need CPR. They are being told if CPR doesn’t ‘R’ then they are not to bring them to the hospital. Which, as my son pointed out, will be his out as EMTs are not allowed to pronounce anyone dead unless “absolute conditions contradictory to life” (or some other wording that I’m not sure of since I’m not the EMT) which means things like not having a head.
This means that if somebody is in cardiac arrest and the EMT cannot revive them, they are to leave that person dead at the scene.
If the person is obviously dead, why should the EMTs be delivering more coal to Newcastle?
These people are not dead dead. They are in cardiac arrest and can be revived. Sometimes the EMTs can do it and sometimes they are revived in the ER. But that takes a whole lot of personnel and equipment. I do not know the percentages of those who enter the ER in arrest who live but some do live.
I assume that is different from location to location. Back when I used to watch Nightwatch, Nightwatch Nation and now on Live Rescue (all similar to Live PD except they follow EMTs and FDs), if someone was, for all intents and purposes, dead, they’d call a doctor who would ask a few basic questions and pronounce them over the phone.
In this scenario docs still have to pronounce. The new rules say leave un-resuscitated victims in place. There is no ‘call the doctor’, they don’t have time for phone calls.
Hospitals are running out of ordinary and improvised beds, and in New York are hiring refrigerated trucks to store bodies. Even if an ambulance brought a critical care patient in there aren’t resources to support or treat them. Bringing patients into the hospital who are going to die anyway without the necessary care is just compounding the problem.
This is going to be “the new normal” for the next several weeks, maybe a couple of months. I won’t say “get used to it” because it is horrifying, but you’re going to see more of it, and not just in NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In fact, regional medical systems in rural areas are even less equipped to deal with this than major urban hospitals.
Remember when we were being told this was all under control and go away like a miracle?
Stranger
So they’re walking away from someone that’s technically still alive, even if they aren’t revivable? That does seem odd. What happens after that? I assume the ME has to come out and pronounce them?
Are the EMTs some how shielded from lawsuits? If I were an EMT in that situation, I’d be worried about getting sued for [something] for not continuing to work on a patient that’s technically still living. Even if it was just because people saw it as a potential payday.
Last CPR training I had, I was told was a pretty low number-- but still high enough to be worth bringing people in.
NO ONE revives from manual CPR alone. All that’s supposed to do is keep people alive until real help can take over. With actually, one exception I did read about where someone revived from the VERY FIRST push. But that person may have been in fibrillation, not actual arrest. Or maybe had JUST gone into arrest, but missed less than two beats, or something. I don’t know. It was a very rare thing-- enough to merit a national news story.
I’m guessing someone did some math, and calculated that the odds of bringing in someone Covid+ in cardiac arrest, who will not be revivable due to damage from the disease, will infect and subsequently cause the death of n patients, and n+1 outnumbers the people who survive cardiac arrest after manual CPR, and are brought into the ER. That number just needs to be (n+1)-x where x>1.
That makes perfect sense Rivkah and I knew there were calculations done to come to this conclusion but it runs counter to everything all the paramedics and EMTs believe in. They are there to save people, not leave them for dead. It also leaves them to make decisions they have been told they are expressly forbidden to make because they don’t have the knowledge.
This is all kinds of fucked up.
Ambulances often bring seemingly dead patients into emergency rooms. Declaring someone dead is a lot more subtle than one might think, and sometimes patients can be revived. Paramedics and doctors sometimes can revive people with a shot of glucose or naltrexone, time and warm blankets or a well placed electric shock to the heart. In cases where it is obvious, they discuss it with a supervisor or doctor. Not every dead patient should come to an emergency room.
Ecuador is having some problems as you describe. I can’t speak for New York but my sympathies to your son. “Medical triage” is a fact of life in Canada and if the doctors think there is no real hope than treatments are sometimes curtailed after “heroic” attempts. Families are encouraged to be realistic about situations and DNR orders.
Our paramedics do that not EMTs.
If they need CPR they are already dead. Only when circumstances are exactly right can that change.
“Nobody dies in the bus” is the EMT motto. They are either dead on the scene or die in the ER. EMTs have been told again and again that they are not equipped to make the judgement. It is one thing to tell the family “We’ve done everything we can” and a completely different thing to tell them, “Whelp, sucks to be this guy!” and leave him at the scene.
When I was growing up my family was obsessed with police scanners–they were left on 24/7 in my house. Many times someone who was very clearly dead (as in, massive trauma in an auto accident) would later be listed as being pronounced dead at the hospital–because a bag full of parts isn’t dead until a coroner says that it is.
Because the alternative is to leave a sick mother with two children stuck in a house with the corpse of her dead husband and no way to get anyone to do anything about it because no one will come near the plague house?!?
If you are going to leave them, at least move them to the curb so that the city will be forced to act.
If they are already dead, no amount of CPR will bring them back.