[songgao]

This might be an unpopular opinion but this is a pretty awful headline and it makes it look way worse than what the EMS documents actually say. There’s a bold text [1] “shall not be transported if return of spontaneous circulation is not achieved in the field”. There’s a pretty big difference between abandoning patients with little chance of survival in general, and giving up after failure to achieve ROSC.

Perhaps at some point we’ll be at the place where EMS really have to give up without even attempting CPR, but we’re not there yet.

That’s not saying the situation is not bad — it’s terrifyingly bad. But a headline designed to make incorrect impression just doesn’t help.

[1] https://twitter.com/Pervaizistan/status/1346295476405084168

EDIT: link, to focus on the right tweet. typo.

[GavinMcG]

In emergency medicine, you've got patients who are dead, and patients who are dead dead.

Patients who are just dead might still be brought back. This isn't about them. Patients who are dead dead because they haven't responded to resuscitation efforts aren't going to be taken to the hospital, is all. And in a lot of places that's already the norm.

[saberdancer]

Isn't the instruction in fact to limit resuscitation efforts to in field? To take it to an extreme, if someone collapses and has a heart attack near a hospital, by this instruction they would have to revive the person (get a pulse/breathing) before transporting them to a hospital.

It sounds very different to what normal procedure would be. I am assuming that usually they try to get the pulse back but that they can continue to do that while in the ambulance (at least that's how it works in the movies). This change would limit that.

[Quequau]

I feel like there's a quote from "Princess Bride" in there but I guess now is not the time.

[Faaak]

Don't they need to be brought to the hospital for organ donation though ?

[wdr1]

There's a lot of bad reporting happening in Los Angeles.

There were a lot of headlines recently about "0% ICU capacity", which led most readers to think there are no ICU beds when there have been about ~50 since mid-December.[1].

The issue is the County Health department set a target of keeping COVID cases to under 30% of an ICU, so when when it exceeds 30%, for each point above 30% they deduct 0.5% from capacity.

I'm not a doctor, so that could very well be an appropriate way to do it, but when it comes to newspapers communicating with the general public, it misinforms people. (And I'm really worried about when we do hit 0 ICU beds -- as we probably will -- that people will be confused and/or lose trust.)

[1] http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/dhs/1070348_DHSCOVID-19Das...

[wbl]

When have they ever run out of oxygen before?

[MattGaiser]

My understanding is that some hospitals have a central oxygen system, no different from how we are all connected to the water system and water comes out of the tap.

If too many taps were open, nobody would get enough water. Well, too many oxygen taps are open.

[labster]

Hospitals are running out of oxygen in a way: so much is going through the pipes that the upper floors have low pressure, and the oxygen pipes occasionally freeze from adiabatic expansion. In LA.

[bradhe]

> But a headline designed to make incorrect impression just doesn’t help.

Yet this is basically all we get. Because it makes people click. It’s so hard to tell what’s real and what’s exaggerated these days. And if you try to make the case that something is exaggerated, you come off as a right wing nut job.

[ibejoeb]

For example, here are some excerpts from just one other LA Times article:

> Many hospitals also say they’re too full to accept any more patients or ambulances

> when paramedics are allowed to drop off patients at a hospital, the emergency room is often so crowded that there aren’t available staff members

> Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones

> canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots so they can triage the hordes

https://archive.is/VxZL9

If context matters, I'd expect an organization like the LA Times to be capable of addressing it. It's so frustrating to have to work backward just to find out if anything is remarkable. At this point, this kind of thing is seriously affecting the well-being of the audience.

[ithkuil]

> And if you try to make the case that something is exaggerated, you come off as a right wing nut job.

Doesn't it depend on the topic? I mean, remember when right wing news outlets were exaggerating the hordes of migrants invading borders etc and "left wing nut jobs" yelling that people are blowing things out of proportion?

I don't think each if these tactic necessarily belong to one political orientation. It's just a particularly infuriating way humans communicate and deal with verbal conflict.

Nowadays the general level of education is much higher than a century ago, yet there is still a long way to go; hopefully we'll have many more centuries to learn how to build a public discourse more effectively.

[justin66]

> It’s so hard to tell what’s real and what’s exaggerated these days.

You had to click through and read a few words in order to determine what was meant in the headline by 'little chance of survival.'

> And if you try to make the case that something is exaggerated, you come off as a right wing nut job.

In this case, you come off as perhaps just a little bit lazy?

edit: in the original complaining post about this topic, songgao links to a 4-post twitter thread that explains how EMS will handle things succinctly and nicely. The first post underneath is someone saying "So will they be left at home to die?"