- Re: Anecdotal aside covid Archived Message
Posted by dan
on May 3, 2020, 8:19 am, in reply to "Anecdotal aside covid "
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derek that's exactly what was happening when it was bad.Don't know about now but presume it's easier.My wife phoned 999 for someone and it took 20 minutes to get through. Usually it's within seconds. There's a pyramid of sick patients. We are still running 2.5 times over capacity in ICU. 10 usually, 12 is full. At worst it was almost 5 times - 50 patients on 3 new wards. I don't have the numbers but the emptied elective surgical wards were filled with patients. I guess hundreds but for all those the number of sick young people in the community will have been even higher. We usually would admit someone with oxygen saturation less than 94%. I heard we were sending people home from A+E with sats of 90% if they looked ok. Another peculiarity of this disease is that you feel relatively well with low oxygen saturation - also happens in two other infections pcp and mycoplasma - not sure why. There will undoubtably have been heart attacks in the community because people have had low oxygen levels - but got no help either because 111 was terrible - and it was - or because they decided to tough it out. For people who are sick there is a dip on days 8 through ten when things go from bad to catastrophic very quickly. This is a relatively small number of people 5% of those with symptoms. In Germany they have cars going to peoples homes checking their saturations and then giving oxygen in the community. We have failed disgracefully at every stage. |