Ambulances in New York haven’t been this busy since 9/11.

An ambulance leaving Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx on Saturday.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

Even as hospitals across New York become inundated with coronavirus cases, some patients are being left behind in their homes because the health care system cannot handle them all, according to dozens of interviews with paramedics, New York Fire Department officials and union representatives, as well as city data.

In a matter of days, the city’s 911 system has been overwhelmed by calls for medical distress apparently related to the virus. Typically, the system sees about 4,000 Emergency Medical Services calls a day.

On Thursday, dispatchers took more than 7,000 calls — a volume not seen since the Sept. 11 attacks. The record for amount of calls in a day was broken three times in the last week.

Because of the volume, emergency medical workers are making life-or-death decisions about who is sick enough to take to crowded emergency rooms and who appears well enough to leave behind. They are assessing on scene which patients should receive time-consuming measures like CPR and intubation, and which patients are too far gone to save.

And they are often doing it, they say, without appropriate equipment to protect themselves from infection.

The paramedics described grim scenes as New York City has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with more than 29,000 cases as of Saturday, and 517 deaths.

Reference: NY Times