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Wuhan Corona Virus Coming Soon? (Now Here)
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04-20-2020, 01:14 PM
How will they cope with another month?
They'll stay in their homes rent-free because evictions are cancelled. How will their landlord cope with another month? (...and so on, and so forth, being broke rolls uphill.) 
04-20-2020, 01:26 PM
being broke rolls uphill
The rich didn’t care that trickle down never worked, except as a slogan and a false promise. They’re probably paying more attention this time.
"I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves
04-20-2020, 01:46 PM
quote: Hospitals are overwhelmed in a bad flu season, as in two years ago. They're chronically operating on the edge, and their unpreparedness for a disease pandemic has been noted in the past. Difference being, during a flu season the ordinary operating procedures are not suspended as they have been during this pandemic. Other than NY, NJ and MI, I haven't heard of any hospitals being overwhelmed by covid19, thankfully. Hospitals have spend a great deal of money hastily preparing for covid19. These extra expenditures coupled with loss of revenue from a suspension of elective procedures has left many of them financially strapped.
04-20-2020, 02:08 PM
Hospitals are overwhelmed in a bad flu season, as in two years ago.
... Other than NY, NJ and MI, I haven't heard of any hospitals being overwhelmed by covid19, thankfully. In 2018 hospitals were overwhelmed with flu patients. In 2020 only three states had hospitals full up. Apparently COVID-19 isn’t “just the flu.” “Just the flu” is even worse. If that’s the case, we should need even less PPE for healthcare workers this year, and yet, we’re told there’s not enough and workers have gone shifts without? What am I missing here?
"I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves
04-20-2020, 02:29 PM
What am I missing here?
Hopefully not your PPEs.
04-21-2020, 02:14 AM
quote: I'm more than willing to disagree with you about some aspect of covid19, as it seems that's your focus here since you overlooked the distinction I made between flu season and covid season. During flu seasons hospitals are not otherwise shut down to strictly deal with flu, that's why a bad flu season can overwhelm them. With Covid, the hospitals have shut down and they've still been overwhelmed, but just in a few cities. Clearly, covid presents a greater challenge to the health care shystem, and who knows how bad it would have been without lockdown measures? PPE use is also much greater with covid than flu.
04-21-2020, 04:22 AM
You know, at some point the flu, the regular ol' flu, has got to feel like it's getting the short end of the stick. The poor buggah never asked to be the staff by which covid19 would be measured, and when we begin to understand the course of the disease maybe we'll learn to disassociate the two..
Covid19 is not the flu, it doesn't infect people like the flu does, and the burden it is placing on our hospital systems is nothing like the flu. To compare the two is in so many ways just wrong. To deal with the flu our healthcare system has all sorts of things at their disposal to combat the disease, drugs and our own body's immune response, and a keen understanding of how the disease progresses in the body, and as such the pressures on the hospitals are in no way similar to the pressures being felt now. Covid19 is a respiratory disease for sure, but beyond that it, in so man ways, is not the flu. Consider this article from the NY Times (opinion piece) in which a respiratory specialist describes his observations.. I have been practicing emergency medicine for 30 years. In 1994 I invented an imaging system for teaching intubation, the procedure of inserting breathing tubes. This led me to perform research into this procedure, and subsequently teach airway procedure courses to physicians worldwide for the last two decades. So at the end of March, as a crush of Covid-19 patients began overwhelming hospitals in New York City, I volunteered to spend 10 days at Bellevue, helping at the hospital where I trained. Over those days, I realized that we are not detecting the deadly pneumonia the virus causes early enough and that we could be doing more to keep patients off ventilators — and alive. On the long drive to New York from my home in New Hampshire, I called my friend Nick Caputo, an emergency physician in the Bronx, who was already in the thick of it. I wanted to know what I was facing, how to stay safe and about his insights into airway management with this disease. “Rich,” he said, “it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” He was right. Pneumonia caused by the coronavirus has had a stunning impact on the city’s hospital system. Normally an E.R. has a mix of patients with conditions ranging from the serious, such as heart attacks, strokes and traumatic injuries, to the nonlife-threatening, such as minor lacerations, intoxication, orthopedic injuries and migraine headaches. During my recent time at Bellevue, though, almost all the E.R. patients had Covid pneumonia. Within the first hour of my first shift I inserted breathing tubes into two patients. Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it. And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be? We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature. Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent. To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition. The above article can be read in it's entirety at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opini...monia.html (this may be behind a paywall, as such I was liberal with how much I pasted above) I think it is clear that we are dealing with something entirely different than the flu. I also think our healthcare system is overwhelmed. If not at our local level here, I know of two doctors from here that are currently in NY, as such it is here, it is world wide. It is also here, in our community, silently looking for other bodies to infect, so, in fact it is here, and one screw up and it will overwhelm our system.. For anyone wanting a keener sense of their own personal condition, the writer of the above quoted article continues.. There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter. Pulse oximetry is no more complicated than using a thermometer. These small devices turn on with one button and are placed on a fingertip. In a few seconds, two numbers are displayed: oxygen saturation and pulse rate. Pulse oximeters are extremely reliable in detecting oxygenation problems and elevated heart rates. Pulse oximeters helped save the lives of two emergency physicians I know, alerting them early on to the need for treatment. When they noticed their oxygen levels declining, both went to the hospital and recovered (though one waited longer and required more treatment). Detection of hypoxia, early treatment and close monitoring apparently also worked for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister. Widespread pulse oximetry screening for Covid pneumonia — whether people check themselves on home devices or go to clinics or doctors’ offices — could provide an early warning system for the kinds of breathing problems associated with Covid pneumonia. People using the devices at home would want to consult with their doctors to reduce the number of people who come to the E.R. unnecessarily because they misinterpret their device. There also may be some patients who have unrecognized chronic lung problems and have borderline or slightly low oxygen saturations unrelated to Covid-19. All patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus should have pulse oximetry monitoring for two weeks, the period during which Covid pneumonia typically develops. All persons with cough, fatigue and fevers should also have pulse oximeter monitoring even if they have not had virus testing, or even if their swab test was negative, because those tests are only about 70 percent accurate. A vast majority of Americans who have been exposed to the virus don’t know it. There are other things we can do as well to avoid immediately resorting to intubation and a ventilator. Patient positioning maneuvers (having patients lie on their stomach and sides) opens up the lower and posterior lungs most affected in Covid pneumonia. Oxygenation and positioning helped patients breathe easier and seemed to prevent progression of the disease in many cases. In a preliminary study by Dr. Caputo, this strategy helped keep three out of four patients with advanced Covid pneumonia from needing a ventilator in the first 24 hours. To date, Covid-19 has killed more than 40,600 people nationwide — more than 10,000 in New York State alone. Oximeters are not 100 percent accurate, and they are not a panacea. There will be deaths and bad outcomes that are not preventable. We don’t fully understand why certain patients get so sick, or why some go on to develop multi-organ failure. Many elderly people, already weak with chronic illness, and those with underlying lung disease do very poorly with Covid pneumonia, despite aggressive treatment.
04-21-2020, 05:04 AM
^Fake news - (you really expect me to read all that
 The hypoxia (low oxygen) issue has been highlighted by many physicians treating covid patients. 50% blood oxygen and still being conscious is "like nothing ever seen before." Earlier steps to measure and improve oxygen levels (nasal tubes, CPAP, etc) appear to be key in improving outcomes. Ventilators are a last step option to try and force more oxygen into the lungs even though they are barely able to still absorb it (hence why only 1 in 5 come off the ventilator alive). Oximeters are like $20, still available on Amazon if sold out locally. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oximeter Over 40,000 Americans dead over the last 4 months from this disease with extraordinary efforts made to reduce transmission - still not just the flu bro.
04-21-2020, 05:04 AM
quote: good points, we may not know how well the lockdown actually worked because the only other country that did not was Sweden. not really a big enough sampling of data to clearly show. The fact that most of the cases in Europe are the more deadly B strain of the virus is also going to skew the figures. And those who got the A version and recovered can they be re-infected with the B virus and survive? There could be some concern in the future as the virus mutates into stronger more virulent strains and there is no herd immunity from exposure to the weaker A and even B strains due to social distancing and lockdown. And, the lockdown will likely not last long enough to see the end and disappearance of the virus |
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