Hospitals in Utah faced with rationing healthcare

Hospitals in Utah are considering rationing healthcare to patients if nurses and doctors become overwhelmed with coronavirus cases.

The hospitals could soon consider a person's health, age and other factors when deciding how to treat a patient in crowded intensive care units swamped with COVID-19 cases, according to administrators representing the state's hospitals.

The state has reported 1,000 new cases per day for the last 12 days, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. On Oct 25, the state reported its highest seven-day average for new daily coronavirus cases. Utah has had more than 108,803 people infected with coronavirus, and 588 people have died since the start of the pandemic.

Hospital administrators sent their rationing proposal to Governor Gary Herbert last week with "criteria they propose doctors should use if they are forced to decide which patients can stay in overcrowded intensive care units".

Like El Paso, Texas, parts of Wisconsin and many other cities and areas experiencing a strain on their healthcare systems from the latest wave of the virus to hit the country, Utah has had to make contingency plans. But rationing patient care has been criticized by health officials who fear it will penalize those who need help the most.

Utah state epidemiologist Dr Angela Dunn tweeted on Monday: "This is NOT ok. It is maddening that we are planning to ration care in Utah. Unacceptable. We must do EVERYTHING we can to slow #COVID spread. No excuses."

At least 37 states, many in the Midwest and West, are reporting record new coronavirus cases and increased hospitalizations and deaths this week. As of Thursday, there have been more than 228,400 deaths from the virus and 8.9 million infections, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

If the rise in hospitalizations continues, the Utah Hospital Association said it wants members to be able to implement the restrictive measures to cope.

Under the plan, the elderly and those not getting better with treatment may be moved from an intensive care unit to make way for someone younger, healthier and more likely to survive, Greg Bell, president of the association said.

Dr Lindsay Leither, director of Intermountain Medical Center's respiratory ICU in Murray, Utah, said that ICUs full of COVID-19 patients exhaust a lot of a hospital's resources, so they need to have options to move people to different beds.

Leither said at an online news briefing: "A lot of our COVID patients tend to be really sick and they do tend to stay in the ICU longer. ... Nurses, all the different therapists that are there, in and out of patients' rooms all day long, putting on and off their [personal protective equipment] and cleaning it."

Dr William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said that older people and those with pre-existing conditions face a difficult time recovering from COVID-19, and even when they do, they can experience long-lasting symptoms.

Schaffner told China Daily: "Some of the more serious things — it tends to happen in people who are more seriously afflicted — is that they've had lung damage or kidney damage whether or not that results in some scarring and diminution in function of those organs is to be seen. Similarly to the heart, since there can be inflammation of the muscle there may be some reduction in the capacity of the heart."

Bell of the Utah Hospital Association told The Salt Lake Tribune that all options must be considered because the nursing staffs in Utah hospitals are stretched thin and hundreds can't work because they have contracted the coronavirus. Others are exhausted after offering care for patients for several months during the pandemic.