San Francisco officials tell residents not to call 911 amid Omicron surge
Officials in San Francisco are asking residents not to call 911 except in dire emergencies to avoid further straining emergency resources, as coronavirus cases deplete the ranks of health workers, ambulance crews, firefighters and other essential workers.
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Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP
The Omicron variant, which appears more likely to cause breakthrough cases even among vaccinated people, has begun to thin the ranks of those most needed to fight this latest wave of infections. San Francisco mayor London Breed said on Friday that about 400 city employees, including emergency responders, had either tested positive for Covid-19 or were isolated at home due to exposure.
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“Only call 911 or go to the emergency [department] for life-threatening medical emergencies,” the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management tweeted this weekend. “Keep medics available for life-threatening situations.”
Related: US sets record for new daily Covid cases amid Omicron surge
While the new variant appears to cause less severe illness, especially among the vaccinated, its highly contagious nature has meant that more and more essential workers are contracting the disease, leaving California’s health and emergency systems critically strained.
Video: How surging Covid cases, hospitalizations are impacting healthcare workers (NBC News)
California has recorded nearly 6m coronavirus cases since the beginning of the pandemic according to state tallies, including more than 300,000 new cases this weekend. The daily coronavirus case rate has been higher during this Omicron-fueled surge than ever before – with about 145 out of every 100,000 residents testing positive. Meanwhile, Los Angeles county – which has cumulatively recorded the most coronavirus cases in the US throughout the pandemic, last week marked its highest single-day total for new cases.
On Friday, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, deployed members of the National Guard to help administer tests at overwhelmed and understaffed testing sites and said the state will send out more National Guard members this week, amid reports that residents are waiting in long lines for hours to receive Covid tests. The deployment would allow strained centers to conduct more tests daily, and help backfill staff absences.
Meanwhile, the state public health department is weighing whether to pause elective surgeries across the state, as individual hospitals are already considering which procedures to delay as Covid-19 reverberates through ranks of doctors, nurses and other hospital staff. This weekend, the health department issued controversial guidelines instructing workers at hospitals and skilled nursing facilities who tested positive for Covid-19 but were experiencing no symptoms to immediately return to work.
The guidelines, which will remain in effect until 1 February, are necessary “due to the critical staffing shortages currently being experienced across the health care continuum because of the rise in the Omicron variant”, the health department explained in a statement. The new policy comes amid record resignations and burnout among health workers two years into the pandemic.
“No patient wants to be cared for by someone who has Covid-19 or was just exposed to it,” said Gabe Montoya, an emergency room technician at Kaiser Medical Center in Downey, representing the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers. “Hospital workers cannot take much more,” said Gisela Thomas, a respiratory therapist in Palm Springs, in a statement issued by the union.
On Saturday, Newsom announced a new emergency funding package, that includes $614m to help hospitals hire more staff, $200m to boost emergency response and state public health capacity and $1.2b to bolster testing.
Although the state is now registering high numbers of positive cases, there are indications that a smaller proportion of these cases are severe – especially among those who are vaccinated. A smaller proportion of coronavirus patients now need hospitalization, and fewer are being admitted to the ICU than was the case last year, health officials have noted.
Still, unvaccinated coronavirus patients have continued to fill hospitals that are once again losing the capacity to accommodate them. “Every resident can also do their part to protect our health care personnel and hospitals” by getting vaccinated, said Los Angeles public health director Barbara Ferrer. “Vaccinated individuals are between 10 and 30 times less likely to need hospital care than those unvaccinated.”
Source: Thanks msn.com