Thirteen patients who arrived at the emergency room at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix last Friday had to be intubated, but there was no room for them in the ICU.
And there was one more patient than there were ventilators on hand in the post-Thanksgiving surge. The ER nurses had to keep the patient breathing by manually squeezing an AmbuBag for two hours before they were able to get a ventilator from the ICU.
“That malfunctioned,” a nurse who asked to be identified by her first name, Nicole, told The Daily Beast. “Then we got one that worked.”
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