• Twin Cities metro hospitals halt ambulance diversions amid COVID-19 crush

COVID-19 pressures have forced Twin Cities hospitals to suspend the long-standing practice of diverting ambulances from their emergency departments when they are overcrowded. ERs are required under federal law to treat walk-in patients, but have long used cooperative diversion systems to protect each other from overcrowding and to reroute ambulances to hospitals with capacity. The idea is to backstop hospitals with one-time surges in demand, or problems such as power outages. But in the pandemic it became a race to see which ER reached capacity and needed to divert ambulances first.