you (and the others) keep on missing the point
This was a triage situation
All protocals are irrelavant!
A 20 min protocal is nice if you have the time. In this situation EMS was required to make a decision. Do we spend the time on this guy or move on to someone else who we have a better chance of helping?
Besides for all the statistics I mentioned before;
The facts are the person in front of you is halachically dead. you have no requirement to spend even 1 minute of precious time on a dead guy.
On the other hand you do have a requirement to help someone who is still alive.
Its a no-brainer.
I don’t think you are being intellectually honest.
If you had 2 patients in front of you one who was unresponsive after 10 minutes of defibrillation, drugs, CPR etc. and another patient who just went into cardiac arrest I think you and everyone else would move unto the second patient.
This scenerio is no different, its just that the 2 patients were at different locations.
Thats what triage is all about. It may be an emotionally difficult decision but we are jews and halacha guides us.
Its a no-brainer. You need to save the living instead of allowing emotions to tie you down and hope for a miracle of techias hamesim on a dead guy.

“If it was your father who they pronounced dead after 20 minutes, you would call them killers too.”

How about if it was you’re father who they never made it too because they spent an hour trying to revive others?

I ABSOLUTELY MEANT EVERY WORD
I am always astonished by the level of ignorance often displayed here especially since it isn’t that difficult to check the facts
There is nothing magical about CPR
as 13 said CPR is to keep oxygenated blood flowing toward the brain but that is the only thing he got right
you still need to re-start the heart. Drugs (epinephrine) and defibrillators are used for that
GO ONLINE AND GOOGLE SUCCESS RATES FOR CPR WITHOUT IMMEDIATE DEFIBRILLATION
its extremely poor
and after 5-10 minutes its essentially non existant
and as i said before even if you get the heart started these patients rarely last the day

BUT since this is a jewish website lets quote Halacha
Halachic death is a person who is not breathing
If you are needed to treat a live patient
and instead you stay with a dead one hoping for a miracle, that is bordering on murder
All this info is available on the web
do some research, learn some halacha instead of wasting your time writing stupidity on these blogs

Thank you for your good ideas. They have elevated what had started out as an absolutely offensive discussion. All are worthy of consideration. I hope that FDNY and the City Administration will consider some of these ideas once they have reviewed the disaster that occurred, and I hope that many of us will support the tax increases (hopefully small) that will be required to make the changes that are implemented.

Clearly you are not qualified, by the look of your response to #11, to comment on anything remotely related to the medical field and medicine as a whole.

As you wrote: “beacause doing CPR pumps the blood and oxygenated blood can get to the brain”.

That is absolutely true. However, after about 4 minutes (give or take a minute) the brain, which is the ONLY cell in you body that cannot store glucose, starts to die without the blood sending fuel to it. Therefore, when someone goes into cardiac arrest (and I’m not even talking about the myocardial infarction issue), they have approximately 4 minutes to get the heart going again. CPR is designed to try to continue the “fuel supply” to the brain. Other cell types in your body, which are able to store glucose, do not have this issue (they can survive for far longer on stored glycogen). But, as you mentioned, they still need oxygen to continue aerobic respiration (glycolysis, krebs cycle, and the electron transport chain located in the mitochondria of the cell). Therefore, CPR is initiated as soon as possible to try to do two things: get oxygen to the tissues, as well as the most important one of all- get oxygen and glucose to the brain, or else the patient is dead either way.

20 minutes without proper myocardial tissue function is a long, long time. Cardiac cells require a lot of glucose and oxygen to function, and if they aren’t getting it for whatever reason (such as a myocardial infarction due to a blocked coronary artery), you can do all the CPR you want, to no avail.

On a regular warm, sunny day, EMS has the luxury of attempting CPR for a long time (upwards to an hour), but the statistics are still the same; someone who goes into cardiac arrest has an extremely slim chance of surviving, CPR or not.

However, what happened on Sunday night was a literal weather disaster; that luxury disappeared. Thousands of patients were in need of emergency care, and due to the snow it was almost impossible to travel on the roads in city ambulances. Therefore, this type of scenario falls under something called “MCI” management- ever heard of it? If not, go google it. Triage is necessary to try to save as many people as possible; if someone has practically no chance of surviving, as with a patient with a cardiac arrest of twenty minutes, it is the duty of the EMT to MOVE ON and try to help someone that could be saved.

It’s easy for you, sitting in your chair in your comfy home, to judge those that put their own lives in danger to help others. But I completely agree with the 20 minute limit of CPR in such a scenario.

And finally- if you would ever like to comment on a story, please, for the sake of those reading it and your own integrity, learn how to spell.

I would like to thank YWn for changing the headline, since the original did not “paas” for a frum website.

That being said, the medics and EMTs shouldn’t be blamed, it is the city officials who have called every shot in this stom incorrectly who should be taking the balem. The same goes for Sanitation, they cannot be blamed for following orders.

Bloomberg ( I refer to him since the commmisoners all anser to him) and administration caused Chaod by ignoring the main roads in both Queens and Brooklyn. They did a terrible job.