California suspends state hospital admissions again during Omicron surge
California's Department of State Hospitals suspended new patient admissions system-wide during the Omicron surge in January 2022, the second major pandemic-era interruption — after a similar suspension in 2020 — to the state's pipeline for admitting incompetent-to-stand-trial defendants for restoration. Admissions resumed the following month.
The repeated suspensions illustrated how a public-health emergency could directly override a legal admission deadline that a state appellate court had upheld only months earlier, a tension that a subsequent academic paper on Oregon's parallel experience would examine in more depth.
Source: Department Directive on Suspension of Patient Admissions to Department of State Hospitals — California Department of State Hospitals
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