This is what it looks like when medical staff at hospitals across the country are incapable of providing seriously ill coronavirus patients with adequate, never mind optimal, care. Physicians have testified before Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash to fighting something of a war of attrition that has medical staff worn out and suffering from what amounts to post-traumatic stress disorder. In this fourth wave of the pandemic, senior medical staff and hospital directors have taken the unprecedented step of alerting the government to the fact that they are being forced to decide who has the privilege of being hooked up to an ECMO machine.
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They are further forced to decide which intubated patient will be hospitalized in the intensive care unit, in which the chances of surviving the virus are far higher given the fact that staff there has the experience necessary to provide the appropriate care. As a result of this lack of adequate care, more and more people are dying from the disease: Since August, over 1,000 Israelis have died from COVID-19.
Almost all of the victims died in hospital coronavirus wards, and according to the assessments of senior physicians, some of them could have survived had ICUs been under less pressure and fewer people were in critical condition and on ventilators. Yet up until now, there were but a brave few who dared to speak out in the face of the silent and immoral majority of senior hospital and Health Ministry officials. This majority appears to have come to terms or Heaven forbid even come to agree to a situation in which hundreds of seriously and critically ill patients receive a standard of care that fails to ensure a large portion of them have a chance to survive.
The Health Ministry has also demonstrated its moral weakness as the body that bears legal and public responsibility for the growing catastrophe. In August, Israel Hayom revealed that in recorded talks with other hospital directors from across the country, director of the public Rambam Health Care Campus Dr. Michael Halbertal admitted hospitals' supposed ability to care for seriously ill patients was a case of whitewashing. He said senior government officials had informed senior Health Ministry officials they "need to get to these numbers, compromise, lower your standards, everything goes."
According to Halbertal, "There was a conversation in which Professor Nachman Ash, the Health Ministry director-general, was under serious pressure, and they demanded the director-general produce solutions for 2,400 hospital beds, and I said we can't. I was told that they are willing to provide extra manpower, but only for a month, and Nachman said, 'Listen, we can't tolerate a situation where the Health Ministry … leads to a lockdown…'"
Ash and the Prime Minister's Office both denied the report.
In practice, some of what was said has already been implemented, as many coronavirus wards in hospitals across Israel have been forced for many weeks to lower the standard of care they provide. As a result, hundreds of patients are dying in agony and from suffocation every day at Israeli hospitals every month in this wave. This is taking place as a majority of doctors and hospital directors remain silent and the Health Ministry, in its shameful weakness, refuses to order hospitals urgently and significantly limit all non-urgent medical activity.
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