Coronavirus thread

[Nephrology]

Considering this (overhyped) virus

Dude, hospitals in NYC have a COVID + census approaching 50% of their inpatients. I just talked to our new ICU faculty yesterday and 50% of the ICU beds at his hospital are COVID+. It is not overhyped. That is idiot talk.

[ER_STL]

There is a doctor/finance guy on Twitter who seems like he might be legit (I couldn’t say) and who has had some interesting thoughts. One thing he’s suggested is that, as with SARS, the hotness of the initial load of virus you get (e.g., someone infected sneezes on you versus surface contact), strongly influences the severity of the infection. Which may explain why most younger, healthy people aren’t getting severe symptoms or dying, but that among those who do a lot of them are doctors, nurses and others in close contact with those infected. Here’s a screenshot of the first tweet in this particular thread, and below that a link to the thread which in turn has links to various studies. Thoughts from the P-F Medical Corps?

Attachment 50668

https://twitter.com/jamestodaromd/st...739504642?s=21

This is exactly about what I was asking earlier. I have no expertise in virology but it seems logical that the more heavily affected might be those who receive a higher initial dose of the virus itself (i.e. sitting in a closed room with those actively symptomatic). Again, I'm just reaching here, but if this were the case, it would offer an explanation for the young marathon runner with no preexisting conditions who ends up in ICU after falling sick - they may simply have received an initial heavy dose or continued being exposed for a longer period of time.

Thanks for sharing.

Oh yeah, thanks to YVK, Nephrology and pangloss for their feedback as well.

[Caballoflaco]

I’m glad they’re getting more widespread testing, but still...Damnit

We basically doubled our cases in Alabama yesterday, went from 219 to over 400.

[Nephrology]

This is exactly about what I was asking earlier. I have no expertise in virology but it seems logical that the more heavily affected might be those who receive a higher initial dose of the virus itself (i.e. sitting in a closed room with those actively symptomatic). Again, I'm just reaching here, but if this were the case, it would offer an explanation for the young marathon runner with no preexisting conditions who ends up in ICU after falling sick - they may simply have received an initial heavy dose or continued being exposed for a longer period of time.

Thanks for sharing.

That may be. There is also the ever loving influence of Murphy. There is a great book called the House of God that describes this phenomenon: the old, demented, obese diabetics "can't die", but the young and otherwise healthy patients who crash. It's not true statistically, but sometimes feels that way in person.

I think the 2nd time I ever did CPR was on a early 40s ish bicyclist who went down with an MI during a race. That sucked.

[5pins]

Just found out a co-worker is showing symptoms. It will take 7 days for the test results.

[GyroF-16]

Just found out a co-worker is showing symptoms. It will take 7 days for the test results.

Sadly, that seems par for the course at this point... It took 8 days for my sister (doctor) to get her negative test result. And the day after she learned she tested negative, the patient who exposed her went into the ICU.

[ranger]

AZ Governor Ducey issued an executive order allowing doctors to do tele-medicine visits over the phone, prescribe meds and bill the medical insurance companies as if it was a live in person visit. Normally if we made a phone call to give advice and make treatment plans, we would get only $15 no matter how long we stayed on the phone. Also, we couldn't order special tests like echocardiograms or stress tests based on the phone call because we didn't actually see the patient in person. I had to cut back on patient visits a lot because they didn't want to come or it wasn't essential. I have also drastically cut back on all my 'elective' heart cases per executive order. This order will really help. Now I can "see" patients, keep my practice running and keep my staff employed. Also it looks like he waived the two-way video requirements for tele-medicine. Normally, a proper tele-medicine setup requires a kinda sophisticated two-way interface with the ability to save the video into your medical record. Now a phone call will be okay.

I suspect that some of these innovations may become permanent after this event

[HCM]

Originally Posted by jellydonut
Considering this (overhyped) virus

Dude, hospitals in NYC have a COVID + census approaching 50% of their inpatients. I just talked to our new ICU faculty yesterday and 50% of the ICU beds at his hospital are COVID+. It is not overhyped. That is idiot talk.

This surgeon does a great job of deep diving into why COVID-19 is not “just the flu” and how it kills.

He also delineates “mild cases” as “not requiring hospitalization.” That doesn’t mean you won’t be sick as hell.



Note to you and the other Docs- use more pimp analogies when breaking things down for patients.... ;-)

[Glenn E. Meyer]

I suppose a decision like this is overhyped and the Navy just panicked.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/coron...craft-carrier/

To combat a growing outbreak of COVID-19 on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the Navy has ordered the ship to pull into Guam and have the whole crew of 5,000-plus sailors tested for the novel coronavirus, the service’s acting secretary announced Thursday.

[Caballoflaco]

Exponential growth is a bitch, we’re going to be north of 80,000 cases in the country by the end of the day