EMS told to triage ‘flu’ rides

COV ambulance crunch

The city’s ambulance corps is so understaffed because of the COVID-19 surge that they are now under new orders to try to persuade stable patients with flulike symptoms not to go to the hospital.

The directive from the FDNY puts EMS crews on notice that “effective immediately, stable patients with influenza-like illness . . . should not be transported to a 911-receiving facility” unless they are more than 65 years old, have a fever above 100.4 degrees or a history of diabetes or heart conditions, according to a copy obtained by The Post.

Oren Barzilay, president of Local 2507, the union representing more than 4,100 city emergency medical technicians and paramedics, said Saturday that more than 30% of his members are out on medical leave, with a vast majority of the absences due to catching COVID-19 on the front lines.

About 20% to 25%, or around 800 members, are out specifically because they caught COVID-19, Barzilay estimated, adding that the city has only itself to blame for not dealing with longtime staffing shortages of medics.

Both he and Vincent Variale, president of the city’s EMS Officers Union Local 3621, said the new orders might be necessary as 911 calls have skyrocketed in the past month.

“It’s a shame that two years into the pandemic, the city isn’t prepared to deal with COVID,” Barzilay told The Post.

The EMS staffing crisis comes as the NYPD is facing its own struggles with coronavirus absences, sources said. There were 6,883 cops out sick Saturday — including 1,920 with COVID-19 — nearly 20 percent of the Police Department, sources said. Five are now hospitalized.

In December 2021, 3,053 cops tested positive for the virus, breaking the previous record since the pandemic started of 2,846 during April 2020.

But the stricken EMS service, which a source said had more than a dozen ambulance crews out of service in Brooklyn alone last week, has an easy fix at its disposal.

About 200 medics could be allowed to come back to work, Barzilay said, after they were put on unpaid leave because of a city mandate requiring municipal workers be vaccinated for COVID-19.

City medics are also routinely putting in 60- and 70-hour weeks. The FDNY last week temporarily lifted an overtime cap applying to all city agencies that prohibits municipal workers from making more than 40% of their salary in overtime, Barzilay said.

Variale said medics are already trained to determine if a patient should go a hospital.

“We don’t want to tell anyone they can’t go to a hospital, but we are vastly understaffed, so we have to do what we can to triage all this and decide who should be going and who shouldn’t,” he said.

But one veteran paramedic said, “The FDNY ambulance crew cannot just leave you . . . It’s abandonment.” The FDNY acknowledged the “high medical leave,” but said all EMS stations are open, and100 newly graduated EMTs went into the field last week.

Larry