As Covid-19 cases surge, hospitals feel the pressure

Recently the U.S. experienced the largest surge of this pandemic, which has led to increased hospitalizations due to Covid-19. 

Large surges of hospitalized Covid-19 patients can cause the entire healthcare system to be overwhelmed and forced to expend all their resources to just addressing those with the coronavirus. This means that people with any type of medical emergency may have to wait hours in areas that are severely affected.

This surge of cases also affects the ambulance system since there is no longer the assurance that an ambulance team will be able to quickly transfer their patient from the ambulance to a hospital bed. The longer a team of paramedics is stuck transferring its patient to a hospital bed, is less time that the ambulance is available to answer other emergencies.

In other areas, hospitals are running out of beds forcing ambulances to travel to hospitals that are hours away. This has gotten so bad in some areas that some emergency medical service teams are no longer supposed to bring people who suffer a heart attack and aren’t stabilized within 20 minutes to the hospital.