LA hospitals postpone surgeries, plead for staffing aid amid surge
LOS ANGELES — Conditions at Los Angeles County hospitals are worsening by the day, forcing officials to take increasingly desperate measures to prevent the health care system from crumbling under a crush of COVID-19 patients.
Methodist Hospital of Southern California has taken the grim step of convening a triage team that will "make the difficult, but necessary decisions about allocating limited resources" to critically ill patients "based on the best medical information available," officials said in a statement.
Supplies of vital equipment, including ventilators, are tight, and there is limited availability of sufficiently staffed intensive care unit beds and healthy hospital workers, the Arcadia-based facility wrote in a public message to patients and their families.
"If a patient becomes extremely ill and very unlikely to survive their illness, even with life-saving treatment, then certain resources currently limited in availability —
