ZeroTolerance

I bet his idea would succeed in killing coronavirus in the body, if you are okay with the side effect of killing the body also.

You guys just don't have enough class, unlike THIS wedding.

I can't say 100% for certain on this one, but I don't believe the coroner/medical examiner is involved in every death.

Nomah was the worst at this.

Bad if it is happening, though again that isn't a hospital falsely reporting a COVID death for money.

Hospitals can't count patients as COVID without actually getting a positive test. What the medical examiner and the state do post-mortem, I have no idea, but it isn't like hospitals can just look at every patient with a fever and say "he counts".

Another quality contribution from the unending disease that is cable news.

Doesn't that qualify like half of the country?

I don't expect this to be anywhere as crazy next year. Probably still an issue, but not requiring shutting down businesses and overwhelming hospitals. Now if we could just get China to do something about those markets so the world doesn't get anal probed again when someone eats an undercooked bat.

And that is with the extreme measures that have been taken across the country, unlike flu season.

Not quite sure what you were citing, but I'll clairfy. We have three adult ICUs, two ICU stepdown units, a rehab unit, and four medical/surgical units. At the height of the pandemic, two of the three ICUs, both stepdown units, rehab, and two medical units were dedicated strictly to COVID positive and under investigation patients. We were using our surgery recovery room and our cath lab as non-COVID inpatient units due to a shortage in available beds. We are slightly improved, but behind other states with large case loads still (we had dropped to 70 inpatients positive 10 days ago and climbed back over 90 this week). To the point on Arizona, like I was saying, not every part of the country has needed extraordinary measures, and I do think that the measures taken beyond the basics (not holding events like concerts or sports games where thousands of people are in a single building, testing of persons who have traveled to or from areas with known COVID outbreaks, etc) should be decided on a state-by-state basis. Arizona shouldn't be expected to go to the same extremes as New York if there aren't the cases that New York has.

And I am not coming onto these threads just pulling random data points and screaming that the sky is falling. I am explaining the reality of the current pandemic from experiencing it first hand. Everything I have posted is actual information, first-hand source, of both how COVID is affecting hospitals, what it does to patients, and how this isn't remotely like even the busiest influenza seasons in terms of those impacts. I am not bringing politics into it, criticizing or praising Donald Trump or anyone in Congress or state governors. Whether or not you choose to believe the numbers, what I am bringing to the table are things that are actually happening. Things that could happen in many more places if these steps were not taken at the state or federal level. It doesn't need to be a Walking Dead apocalypse to be a real threat that requires real action.

The great fallacy, because I have as much right to my opinion as you do, my opinion is therefore as valuable as yours. The opinion of a troll with a second rate argument using third-hand information or the information provided from a healthcare worker directly from actual events and resources. What he has provided is about as good as any opinion I might provide on the safety of nuclear power versus coal or hydroelectric. Nowhere have I provided "answers", I provide information direct from a source. People like Observer, and apparently you, just attack the information because it doesn't fit what you want or choose to believe. Hence why you throw out political affiliation to rebut me, when I haven't taken a political stance of any type, or why Observer just throws random sh*t at the wall like bringing up cancer, or his unsourced statistics of what demographics are affected by this disease. Also why both of you are trying to insinuate that I am arguing for complete disruption of the economy, because it is easier to bait people into agreeing with your side if you can demonize me, whether you actually have a basis for your efforts or not.

Yes, lets all listen to the troll who just parrots whatever he reads on Facebook or Twitter or cable news. Clearly the source of great knowledge and...well, red herrings. For starters, you are making the assumption that when I point out the effects of COVID in large numbers in any given area that I am saying the entire country is going to get it, which at no point have I made any such claim...hell, I haven't even stated how much of the country requires lockdown or how drastic that lockdown needs to be, but putting words into the other side's mouth is how trolls like you operate so it is to be expected. As far as your assumption that living in high density sh*t holes is the only time there will be a problem...my first point would be that the second largest number of cases in this county are located in an upscale, mostly white city that has a population of 8200 people. But a better example would be Dougherty County, Georgia. There are 1400 cases and just shy of 100 deaths in a rural county with a total population of 94,500 people. How did a random, non-urban high density sh*t hole end up with so many cases and deaths? Because of literally TWO funerals. That is all it took to spread COVID to that many people, two funerals where one or two persons carried infection whether they knew it or not. That is the reason for social distancing and masks, basic common sense steps. Your next random point is bringing up how cancer is bad and treatment for it is bad. Which has exactly what to do with a communicable disease that has spread across the country and killed thousands? Nothing, of course, you just are throwing out unrelated sh*t and grinning at how brilliant your non-existant point was. Onward to your mortality rate argument. You do realize, or at this point maybe there is enough evidence to prove you don't, that deaths aren't the only thing that causes stress on medical systems, no? Even if some absurd number of the critical COVID cases we have had in our hospital survived, that is still 25% of our non-critical inpatient beds and over 80% of our ICU beds being occupied by a single illness at any given moment, for weeks on end. And guess what, your cancer patients and your diabetic patients, and your old patients, and everyone who gets in an accident or has a heart attack or any other damn medical emergency are still happening and still requiring care and hospital beds and ICU beds. Which aren't necessarily available, because of COVID. In summary, the COVID-19 pandemic IS a legitimate disaster, it IS something the governments whether state or federal are right to deal with. How far they need to or should have gone with those steps varies, and there have certainly been oversteps by some, but this idea that you keep peddling that this is nothing but influenza and it is stupid that the US has shutdown parts of its economy over it is as mindless as most of your posts.

The general picture for the critical patients is along the lines of... Severe hypotension secondary to sepsis, requiring the use of one or more vasopressors to maintain a survivable blood pressure (side effect of vasopressors is death of tissue in the extremities, amputation resulting from long periods of their use). Renal failure severe enough to require CRRT (continuous dialysis). CRRT requires the use of heparin to prevent the lines from being clotted off...unfortunately these patients also have coagulopathy, clotting factors being wasted in forming clots where they are not needed, leaving insufficient clotting factors to prevent bleeding from IV sites, CRRT sites, any other wounds. Severe lung failure, necessitating mechanical ventilation with high levels of PEEP (which has a negative effect on blood pressure) and oxygen (which itself is damaging over long periods when concentrations greater than 50% are used), and in several cases pulmonary hypertension requiring the administration of inhaled nitric oxide (I've already seen more adult patients on INO this month than the previous 11 years of my experience combined). For several of these patients, these measures alone have not been enough and we have needed to use proning (placing the patient face down for 12-16 hours at a time) to try to keep blood oxygen levels high enough to not cause anoxic damage to the brain and other organs. Half of the patients I personally have had come off of the ventilator failed within 24 hours and were reintubated. As mentioned in an earlier post, the use of hydroxychloroquine has not proven useful in patients who are already well into the disease process (similar to how Tamiflu is only useful within the first 72 hours of symptom onset for influenza). ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) has had some success, though it is extremely limited (major funding required for the equipment, specialized trained staff to operate it) with only a couple hospitals in the state who have it available, and limited machines to run it with (plus the coagulopathy symptom has caused problems with the catheters that remove blood from the body and reinject it clotting off). I have not heard of anyone using high frequency oscillatory ventilation on these patients so far.