Deadly Delays

It’s been well over a year since Mayor de Blasio announced the city had “identified the problems” with its emergencyresponse system and committed himself to “taking the necessary corrective action.” But the latest city data show things are still headed in the wrong direction.

As The Post’s Aaron Short reported Sunday, the response time by city EMTs and paramedics is climbing — despite a drop in actual medical emergencies.

Staten Island has the lowest average wait time for an ambulance: 10 minutes, 26 seconds. In The Bronx, it’s up to 14 minutes, 29 seconds.

Citywide, the average for 2015’s first eight months was 12 minutes, 23 seconds — 37 seconds slower than in the same period last year.

In The Bronx, Emergency Medical Service workers took 40 added seconds to respond, despite a 2 percent drop in cases. In Manhattan (which also saw fewer cases), the wait was 64 seconds longer.

When it comes to heart attacks, drug overdoses and such lifethreatening cases, literally every second counts.

Back in February, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro vowed to speed up ambulance responses by 20 seconds this year. And the mayor pledged to hire 149 new EMS dispatchers and add 54 ambulance tours.

The exactreverse results are all too typical of Team de Blasio — where announcing new spending seems to be the last time City Hall pays attention to a problem.

Yes, the rising emergencyresponse times predate de Blasio. Yet he was a big EMS critic while running for mayor — and vowed to make things better.

Thing is, making good on such promises requires birddogging the issue. And, as Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (DQueens), who’s been on top of this issue for years, noted last winter: “There are no changes that the administration has put in place to stop the waste of critical time.”

De Blasio is plainly far more interested in big abstractions than in managing daily services like EMS. But he asked for the responsibility, and now he’s got it. Lives are at stake.