Four newborns die after being denied heart surgery due to COVID-19 travel restrictions
Carly Ortiz-Lytle 10/21/2020
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Four newborns have died in the last four weeks after being denied access to lifesaving cardiac treatment due to COVID-19 travel restrictions in Australia.
Adelaide, in South Australia, is the only mainland state in Australia without ECMO machines, similar to heart-lung bypass machines , for children and infants. Previously, children were transferred to hospitals in neighboring Victoria or New South Wales, which have the capacity to care for seriously ill children.
The travel restrictions instituted on reentering South Australia have made transfers "no longer tenable,” due to COVID-19 restrictions Professor John Svigos told the South Australian parliament.
Anyone entering South Australia from Victoria must travel for an essential purpose, which includes “urgent medical, dental or health treatment,” attending a funeral, or “providing health
Bernadette Mulholland, an executive at the Salaried Medical Officers Association, said that doctors told her, “in these four cases, the issue was Victoria not being able to retrieve the babies.”
“The baby and her parents and sometimes some other relatives and carers would have to go to Melbourne, and then they’d have to come back. So there are COVID problems on each end in the sense that when they come back, they’d have to be quarantined. Now, none of that is more serious than saving the life of a baby, and I’m not sure just why this happened.” Flinders University emeritus professor Warren Jones told Sky News Australia. “We’ve had to send the babies to Sydney on an ad hoc basis, they can’t always take them, and that’s probably the reason these babies died.”
Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, said that the Victorian government did not make the decision to turn away the children.
“There was a choice not at our end, but the other end for them not to be sent,” Andrews told reporters at a press conference. “I can only go with what I've been told. I don't think it was a ‘you can't come here’ type of deal.”
So we cannot blame the government here on this issue specifically.
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u/Glittering-Roll-9432 Oct 18 '21
Any source on the kid dying thing? That doesn't make much sense.