COVID: Overcrowded and short on ECMOs, Israeli hospitals are in crisis

• Published date: 24 September 2021
• Author: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The country's hospitals are overcrowded. Their coronavirus wards are collapsing and the doctors who are trying to treat all of these patients are crashing. There is not enough lifesaving equipment, nor skilled personnel to manage it.

We read in the U'Netaneh Tokef prayer: "How many will pass from the earth and how many will be created? … Who will die at his predestined time and who before his time… who by famine, who by thirst … who by plague?"

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Will Israeli doctors be the ones to decide?

"We are very close to a situation of choosing among patients" in the coronavirus wards, said Dr. Masad Barhoum, the director of Galilee Medical Center this week.

A 53-year-old man was hospitalized in serious condition, but not from coronavirus, in a relatively small hospital that did not have any ECMO machines. He died while the hospital was trying for too long to find a larger medical center that could treat him, N12 reported.

The majority (about 40) of the country's "heart-lung machines" are being used by unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. According to hospital staff, when about six or seven more patients are put on ECMO machines, hospitals will be forced to turn away others who need them.

It is not just the number of devices, but also the manpower to manage them. Every patient on an ECMO machine requires 24/7 nursing care.

"We have no staff to deal with these people," Dr. Yael Haviv-Yadid, the head of an intensive care unit and coronavirus ICU at Sheba Medical Center, told The Jerusalem Post. "We may always have spare machines, but we won't have the staff to run them."

While the Health and Finance ministries delivered additional funds to the hospitals to hire new staff, it did not all come and certainly not in time.

Junior doctors need to be trained, Haviv-Yadid explained.

Moreover, in the Arab sector, where there has been a 150% increase in serious patients, the medical aid organization Yad Sarah has said it has a shortage of portable oxygen tanks, which can help keep some COVID patients out of the overcrowded hospitals.

"With great pain, we are forced to turn away patients," said Yad Sarah CEO Moshe Cohen. "We are begging for oxygen tanks in order to make room in the coronavirus wards and save lives.

There are also not enough hospital beds.

In the first COVID wave, the government instructed hospitals to refrain from offering any...