How a Well-Meaning Health Policy Created California’s Coronavirus Nightmare

Everyone’s worst pandemic nightmare is happening in Los Angeles. Intensive-care units are overflowing with patients gasping for breath, and there might not be enough ventilators to go around. If a patient has virtually no chance of survival, ambulances have been told not to bother transporting them to a hospital at all. People experiencing a heart attack or kidney stones can’t count on a bed being available for them.

But perhaps it should be no surprise that California’s hospitals are full to bursting: the state has COVID-19 hospitalization rates in the country, and it has relatively fewer hospital beds than most other states—just , compared with 4.8 in South Dakota, which has the most beds in proportion to its population. California’s relatively few hospital beds are attended by relatively few nurses,