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My ER doctor uncle has told me at the very beginning of this pandemic, "You don't want to be on that ventilator"
I am young, fit, healthy, and not one of those high risk people, but I am hiding myself in my house because I do not want this nasty bug in my body, period. To each his/her own.
In my uncle's hospital at least, the mortality rate of people on ventilator is way over 50%, and many people suffer from multi organ failure and many have been on ventilator for 15 plus days and they still die. This means, overwhelming MAJORITY of the patients ON VENTILATOR cannot make it.
A doctor has to thread a 10-inch plastic tube down a patient’s throat and into the lungs, attaches it to the ventilator, yikes! The truth is that many patients were so critically ill their chances of survival were poor no matter what care they received.
Certainly the drug like hydroxychloroquine might not work for the critical ill patients, but guess what? ventilators might not work for them either. For the high risk folks, you have to treat them EARLY, (yeah, easier said than done) My uncle's hospital uses non-invasive methods, and avoids putting patients on ventilators too early.
Last edited by lilyflower3191981; 05-17-2020 at 09:02 AM..
Did you call your state health to get the stats? Last I recall visitation was restricted. When did California change that guideline? So in the kindest of ways...driving around to four hospitals doesn't validate or confirm the assumption parlayed here.
Common sense seems lacking in some areas.
Your "kind way" of calling someone an idiot is uncalled-for. If a poster living in Orange County wants to check out the hospitals, there is no law against driving around and observing that ER parking lots are not full, or peeking through the window to see that the ER is almost empty.
There are 25 OC hospitals treating COVID-19 patients. Four is a reasonable sample. You can also, of course, check the website to see that there are only 235 COVID patients in the hospital in the whole county, and of those, only 85 are currently in the ICU. The hospitals can handle that.
My ER doctor uncle has told me at the very beginning of this pandemic, "You don't want to be on that ventilator"
I am young, fit, healthy, and not one of those high risk people, but I am hiding myself in my house because I do not want this nasty bug in my body, period. To each his/her own.
In my uncle's hospital at least, the mortality rate of people on ventilator is way over 50%, and many people suffer from multi organ failure and many have been on ventilator for 15 plus days and they still die. This means, overwhelming MAJORITY of the patients ON VENTILATOR cannot make it.
A doctor has to thread a 10-inch plastic tube down a patient’s throat and into the lungs, attaches it to the ventilator, yikes! The truth is that many patients were so critically ill their chances of survival were poor no matter what care they received.
Certainly the drug like hydroxychloroquine might not work for the critical ill patients, but guess what? ventilators might not work for them either. For the high risk folks, you have to treat them EARLY, (yeah, easier said than done) My uncle's hospital uses non-invasive methods, and avoids putting patients on ventilators too early.
Yup common sense -- ventilator is a last ditch effort for someone who is sick....and the outcomes are not good but without the ventilator the outcome is 100 per cent BAD.
Your "kind way" of calling someone an idiot is uncalled-for. If a poster living in Orange County wants to check out the hospitals, there is no law against driving around and observing that ER parking lots are not full, or peeking through the window to see that the ER is almost empty.
There are 25 OC hospitals treating COVID-19 patients. Four is a reasonable sample. You can also, of course, check the website to see that there are only 235 COVID patients in the hospital in the whole county, and of those, only 85 are currently in the ICU. The hospitals can handle that.
But you can't tell by parking lots.
They do nothing to tell you what is going on inside.
RIght now at many hospitals -- NOBODY is allowed to accompany someone into the hospital -- for treatment, for emergency for anything.
Driving up to a hospital and seeing an empty park lot and drawing the conclusion that the hospital is operating at under capacity is non-sensical. You can't assume your perceived outcome is accurate.
. .driving around to four hospitals doesn't validate or confirm the assumption parlayed here.
Common sense seems lacking in some areas.
I am a longtime orange county resident recently moved from Newport beach to Irvine.
My family's "go to hospital" is Hoag. I haven't been outside my house for almost 2.5 months now, but I won't be surprised the ER is less busy. Most hospitals treat this covid-19 crap as the only illness out there anyway, many doctors simply do not work anymore. Friend's mom is a cardiologist who won't go back to her private practice until July. Many elective procedures have been postponed, or cancelled. Plus, 10% of cases in California at least have been healthcare workers.
My uncle is in his 60s and an ER doctor. He said many people are too afraid to use the ER now, maybe this explains why the parking lot is empty (well, relatively speaking)
I wish more people take this illness more seriously. This bug is not a super bug, but this illness is no joke.
They do nothing to tell you what is going on inside.
Right now at many hospitals -- NOBODY is allowed to accompany someone into the hospital -- for treatment, for emergency for anything.
Driving up to a hospital and seeing an empty park lot and drawing the conclusion that the hospital is operating at under capacity is nonsensical. You can't assume your perceived outcome is accurate.
We were talking about the ER in Orange County. Here, you can certainly drive right up to the ER door and look in to see if it is busy. I've done it myself (not in a COVID-related circumstance). You can observe whether cars and people are or are not briskly coming and going. It's not hard around here to confirm that ERs are not bustling with sick people. The OC website stats back that up, by the way.
Maybe people who have their feet on the ground here have a better idea of what is going on than forum posters who may live in a different state or even a different country.
Yup common sense -- ventilator is a last ditch effort for someone who is sick....and the outcomes are not good but without the ventilator the outcome is 100 per cent BAD.
You figured that out, huh? Congratulations!
My uncle won't use a ventilator. He would choose to keep on breathing, keep on moving until he couldn't. No ventilator for him. But that is his individual choice as an ER doctor. I am pretty sure he cannot speak for everybody else, I am pretty sure he cannot speak for ALL doctors, he can only speak for himself. A CHOICE.
See, this is the problem I have with you.
You've been calling everybody who just wants to keep an open mind anti-science, truth is, most people just want to keep their options open.
You've called Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19 bull sh*t because this is some kind of Republican Propaganda,
W.H.Y D.O Y.O.U do that?!
Most people just want to keep their options open, no more/less. Nobody is saying the drugs are magic pills, this is why A clinical trial has begun to evaluate whether the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, given together with the antibiotic azithromycin, can prevent hospitalization and death from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
The key thing is to figure out WHEN, How much and to whom.
It has nothing to do with propaganda or politics. If this drug is useless, then it is useless. Why calling it a propaganda just because Donald Trump has recommended it?
Last edited by lilyflower3191981; 05-17-2020 at 10:19 AM..
DingDingDing, we have a winner. We do have a scientific method, and a critical part of it is trying advance science is to promote and test a variety of different hypotheses. Yet we don't do that-the only ideas we consider are the ones promoted by government bureaucrats, sometimes posing as scientists. We accepted their word that there was no human-to-human transmission. We listened as those experts (CDC) said we don't need internationally available test kits, nor from American companies or universities-the CDC had it covered, and in fact banned (via the FDA) other tests. And then they screwed the pooch hard, made a test that failed, and cost us weeks before we could start testing. Real science would have multiple sources of kits, and test all of them for their efficacy.
We spend billions funding the CDC-they should be providing guidance and leadership to medical professionals "in the trenches". Instead, it is the troops on the front lines that have to run their own studies, develop their own treatments and do their own science. I watched the video DRob presented in post 7 when it came out (I think the same doctor did others). His statements as to how the virus "functioned" made sense, as did his treatment advice (now largely accepted)...but he was virtually shut down because he wasn't parroting the opinion of government "experts". And if my memory is correct, he was making those calls at the time the DPA was being discussed to force the production of vents.
We don't listen to actual scientists and medical professionals so much as we do politicians and media talking heads in this country. We suppress actual science and medical professionals if they don't go along with the status quo. (and in fact delete their videos from Youtube and Facebook). People listen to talking heads like "Dr." Gupta on CNN, rather than doctors currently practicing in the field or laboratory. We ignore the scientific method and attack those that question the socially acceptable hypothesis.
When people use science and data to point out that the "lockdown" has failed, they are shouted down and denounced. It a "lockdown" has been effective-why have 25% of New York City residents been infected in just a few weeks? And that 25% infection rate was nearly a month ago; it's undoubtedly higher now.
Scientists and medical professionals that promote the concept of herd immunity are attacked and denounced and the entire concept is mocked. Never mind that it is what has protected humanity for millenia. There is no testing or evaluation of the hypothesis, just mocking. In spite of the fact that cases and deaths are falling in NYC-as they approach an infection rate where HI has an impact.
Hydroxychloroquine has been has been promoted and used by many doctors with at least some degree of success around the world. Multiple studies outside of this country have indicated at least a degree of success. Yet because Trump dared mention it, the "experts" in this country have denounced it prior to even evaluating it. Even now, after months, studies in this county are very limited. (I'm not saying that it's effective, only that no science was involved in condemning it).
He wasn’t really shut down, so much as he was wrong. Or maybe a better way to put it is, he was not very helpful.
Maybe because he is an ER doctor, he doesn’t follow these people past their initial point of entry. We all saw this video and the one he made before it. I am willing to try anything that sounds like it might work, and from what I have seen, so are most of the other doctors. We are not too proud to try something that could save the lives of our patients.
And after the first week or so, when it became apparent that patients on the ventilators had an extremely poor outcome, we decided that ventilators would be a last resort. We tried the high flow oxygen, we tried the BIPAP. All the stuff he said we should be doing instead of ventilators, we did.
The patients still ended up needing ventilators in order to possibly live. The patients would get to a point where they could choose a sure death within the hour WITH the high flow oxygen, but without the ventilator, or go on the ventilator and probably live for a week or two, and then die, but with the slight chance they would make it. It came down to a horrible choice vs a REALLY horrible choice.
Then, listen again, at the end when he says if the patient DOES need a ventilator, we need to use different settings. Notice, he doesn’t tell us what those settings are. Please tell me what those settings are, because I have tried every possible setting the machine has, and the only settings where the patient doesn’t deteriorate, are the high pressure settings. Lowering the PEEP causes them to rapidly deteriorate. They need it just to survive. Yes, we all know that high pressure settings can cause lung damage, but again, we are stuck with two very bad options, one of which is worse than the other.
We have had over 300 people on ventilators, in a hospital that has 110 ventilators. The only reason we didn’t run out of ventilators is because people were dying so quickly, which freed up ventilators for new patients that needed them. Our ventilator mortality rate at first was 95%, and then went down to 85% by the end of the first month.
Now it is down to 70% And dropping more still, because it seems that the people who made it past 3 weeks on the ventilator, have a better chance of living. Most of the ventilator patients die of multiorgan failure within 3 weeks, but if they dont, and the virus is no longer causing issues, they are being successfully extubated, alive. Many, especially the older patients, are still too weak to breath on their own, and they are getting tracheostomies, and will hopefully eventually breath strongly enough to be weaned off the ventilators.
So he was wrong. Everything was done correctly considering the equipment we have to work with. He didn't mention this, but in my opinion, maybe ECMO would be best. In fact, I think it likely would be the best thing for many of these patients. But there are so few ECMO machines to go around, and at $40k a day to run them, it would not be economically feasible even if we did have enough of them.
I think they have figured out that those bubble things that fit over the head work better than a ventilator, but I'm not sure how many hospitals are using those.
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