Trenton is 1 of 440 Municipalities in NJ in the Red Zone for COVID-19 transmission! Red zone means that the City’s transmission is at a high level!


Trenton Health Director Lopez

Trenton, NJ ( Mercer) As COVID-19 cases continue to rise, hospital emergency rooms are nearly at total capacity every day, causing the hospital to go on full divert.

What is ER diversion?

Emergency Room (ER) Diversion happens when a hospital and its emergency room are overloaded so they can no longer safely accommodate another patient. The hospital will declare itself on a “diversion” status, meaning that they cannot accept new ambulance arrivals until they can recover to what they deem is a safer time.

Some hospitals go on diversion for only an hour, some extend for several hours. The emergency medical technicians have no choice but to bypass a facility in favor of another one. While the alternate hospital is not obliged to honor the request, they usually accommodate the patient.

This week in one day, all Hospitals in Mercer County were on Divert; some of the diverted was due to patient capacity and some others due to staff shortages. One EMT added that

RobertWood Johnson hospital Hamilton is now also on divert due to patient volume.

“When everyone is on divert, no one is on divert.”

Today two hospitals are on divert status, and the following hospitals are Capital Health Regional Medical Center due to patient volume and only accepting trauma and neuro patients and St. Francis Medical Center on full divert due to patient volume as of Wednesday night.

Capital Health release the following Facebook post this week.

Please be aware that our Emergency Rooms do not provide COVID-19 screening tests for asymptomatic members of the community. Testing is only administered to appropriate patients who are sick and require emergency room services. Results of those tests have a turnaround time of up to 72 hours. Thank you for understanding and allowing us to focus on those patients in need of emergency care.

Editor in Chief of Peterson’s Breaking News of Trenton, founded in 2012.