More hospitals forced to ration care amid delta surge

Coronavirus patients are flooding and straining hospitals across the U.S., particularly in Western states, where administrators are put in positions of needing to ration care as their facilities are pushed to their breaking points by the delta variant.

Alaska this past week joined Idaho in adopting statewide crisis standards of care that provide guidance to health care providers making difficult decisions on how to allocate limited resources. Several hospitals in Montana have either activated crisis standards of care or are considering it as the state is pummeled by COVID-19.

Under the guidelines, providers can prioritize treating patients based on their chances of recovery, impacting anyone seeking emergency care, not just those with COVID-19.

“Ultimately it’s a decision about, at that point in time, who we feel is most likely to benefit from what may be a limited resource,” said Michael Bernstein, regional chief medical officer in Alaska for the health care company Providence.

Typically, crisis standards of care involve a scoring system to determine the patient’s survivability, sometimes including their estimated “life years” and how well their organs are working. Such guidelines do not call for factoring in vaccination status, much like emergency rooms don’t prioritize certain car crash victims based on whether a driver was drinking.

Still, the vast majority of COVID-19 patients overwhelming hospitals are unvaccinated, months after the vaccine became widely available to U.S. adults.