Quote:
Originally Posted by BeerGeek40
I am here to learn. Give me more information.
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Covid at its worst needs ICU help for patients to recover.
The problem isn't in the number of hospitals, nor the number of beds in them. It's in the number of ICU units- the bed, supporting med equipment, zone safety and equipment, and greater number of personnel who are specialists in intensive care.
It's much more than just a bed, and more than a bed and a ventilator.
The name 'Intensive Care' indicates what it is; the highly intensive, last-ditch care that can pull a dying human from the edge of death when nothing else can. Only the sickest of the sick ever need such extensive care.
And the sickest people always require the slowest recoveries. Once an intensive care patient gains enough strength and health that the care is no longer needed, they go to a normal recovery bed in a hospital to finish getting back on their feet again.
In all the rural states, and out here in the far west, where there's still more empty space than people, there are many tiny little towns that are so small they can't afford to have a local hospital. A hospital simply costs too much every day to be affordable.
So, for basic health care, a small clinic, or a small doctor's group works well enough. Most small towns are within a short flying distance to a larger city with a full hospital in it. These days, hospitals have helicopter companies that make their money doing med evac and rescue flights.
In normal times, these flights serve the little towns well enough. Non-emergency hospitalization allows families to drive the patient to the hospital too.
Living in the country does provide some safety from some common health problems. Covid didn't spread out in the country as quickly as it spread in the big cities.
But it still survived in the countryside, so eventually, it began to spread. And now, in this 2nd and 3rd wave of the virus, the country spread has added hundreds of sick patients to the hundreds of city patients. And many of them from either place need to be in an ICU unit to survive.
Placing them in a normal hospital bed won't help them very much. But it could spread the virus through the ward, which would then have to be de-contaminated, taking that ward out of action when it's also needed.
Once an ICU is full, it could stay full for weeks while the patients inside are recovering enough to be moved out.
So when they're full, all the others who may be dying will simply have to wait for their turn inside the ICU. They may die before they ever get there, or they may walk out of an ICU in a month's time to go home, well enough to go home, where complete recovery may take many months.
Who lives and who dies becomes a roll of the dice. Someone gets lucky, someone else doesn't. The ICU care determines the difference between life and death. If country people have filled up all the ICU units, city people will come and die.
If city people have filled up the ICU units, thehe n the country people who are sick with Covid will come and die.
The hospital wasn't built with a pandemic in mind. ICU units are hard to create inside them. The Federal MASH mobile hospitals have them, but they, too, are limited.
So when 1 out of every 100 people catches Covid in a huge area that has only 10 ICU beds in it, there are going to be a lot of very sick people who won't ever get the care that could save their lives.
You could be one of those folks, as could I.
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