Coronavirus thread

[willie]

There appears to be no bottom to the depths of human ignorance and resultant bad choices.

Blues either taught school or worked in a jailhouse. How else would he know this?

[Balisong]

Is there anyone left there? My folks winter in Surprise, AZ. They said the Canadians headed out as soon as the word got out. My folks left mid March and will finish their quarantine on April 2nd. They currently have zero signs of anything. They basically said that their retirement community was a ghost town by March 18th.

Interesting I didn't know that. There are less out of town plates on the road than is usual this time of year, but there less cars in general. But it makes sense, otherwise I think there would have been an explosion of hospitalizations in the Sun City area (2 hospitals plus mine is pretty close to it as well)

[Nephrology]

One morning last week I drove from my garage to campus in 16 minutes. My previous record has been something like 21 minutes. A month ago, if anyone had told me that I could make it from my garage to work in 16 minutes, I would have told them that they were absolutely crazy. My hope is that a number of things that were impossible last month will come to pass next month.

We have three of four clinical trials starting here, one of which is a multicenter study that we are lead on. Some of the others involve chloroquine. I'm not involved in any of those studies, but if we have three or four ready to go, larger places will certainly have even more planned. As of right now, clinicaltrials.gov returns 202 hits for "COVID-19." Eighty-eight of these trials are already recruiting. For off-label use of approved drugs, the toxicity/pharmacology/safety is already known from previous trials. All we need is to show efficacy, and for a disease that lasts less than three weeks, efficacy, or the lack thereof, will be determined very very quickly. Solving this problem is not something that "will" happen but rather "is" happening. We're in present tense now.

For sure - it will just take a necessary interval of time to enroll all the patients, treat them, follow them to discharge, analyze outcomes, write up results. It will happen that much I am confident in. I just hope we get lucky with some of these early drug candidates

Formula One


https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52087002#

"Early reports from Lombardy in Italy suggest about 50% of patients given CPAP have avoided the need for invasive mechanical ventilation."

Problem with CPAP/BiPAP/ other forms of non-invasive positive pressure ventilation is that it generates a ton of aersol. The device basically spews patient secretions all over the room. Thats why a lot of shops are going straight from high flow nasal cannula to ET intubation. There's also the anecdotal belief that those who get too sick for HFNC are gonna need a tube anyway.

[Nephrology]

This doesn’t help things......a Doctor came back from Florida spring break and didn’t self quarantine and decided it was a good idea to go business as usual and see patients all week in a hospital before finally getting tested.....he is positive for COVID-19.

Don't forget this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/u...dartmouth.html

[Caballoflaco]

While the title of this piece is that Austria is going to make masks mandatory for public wear the more interesting part to me is that they’re going to do some randomized testing this week.

Austria is also carrying out tests on a representative sample of 2,000 people to get a clearer understanding of how much of the population has been exposed to the virus, Kurz said, adding that Austria was one of the first countries in Europe to do so. The results will be available at the end of the week.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...gWDtXoRf4M8JpU

[YVK]

My daughter is a flight nurse at our university hospital. She said medical workers there are getting threats while walking to and from their parking areas and lots of them are afraid it's going to get sporty for real. Supposedly fear that they are spreading this crap. I sent her a some Sabre Red in a couple of different carry configurations and told her her walk in groups. Pisses me the hell off that they're a NPE in times like these, but it's a job that's best not lost since she worked for 12 years to get it. Anyone else dealing with this crap?

IIRC, there was a story in the paper here that medical pros who wore their scrubs into a store were being seriously social-distanced by other people.

I can't blame people for that. But yelling at folks who are trying to save our lives at a real risk to their own is just nuts.

We haven't seen any hostilities. We also sent a system/state - wide note, very early, of avoiding wearing scrubs in public so nobody gets nervous. This policy made things much harder on nursing staff that work in outpatient clinic. Hospital based staff has access to lockers and they normally change anyway. Outpatient clinics don't have lockers but they are still required to wear scrubs, so running an errand or getting groceries on the way home is no difficult.

[Caballoflaco]

Here’s a good article from another ER Doc in New Orleans that I haven’t seen posted. They’re discharging patients with nasal O2 tubes (and take home oxygen) just for try to keep beds open.

https://www.citizenfreepress.com/bre...xcellent-read/

[Spartan1980]

That makes no sense. I would have never thought that people could be that stupid, but on the other hand, I should not be surprised. Where is security?

Way too big and don't have the staff for escorts. Some of the parking garages are quite a walk and down city streets.

[blues]

Way too big and don't have the staff for escorts. Some of the parking garages are quite a walk and down city streets.

I don't have adequate words to apologize for the miscreants among us, but please tell your daughter that her heroic efforts are appreciated by those of us who still have a semblance of humanity and reason.

[HeavyDuty]

My daughter is a flight nurse at our university hospital. She said medical workers there are getting threats while walking to and from their parking areas and lots of them are afraid it's going to get sporty for real. Supposedly fear that they are spreading this crap. I sent her a some Sabre Red in a couple of different carry configurations and told her her walk in groups. Pisses me the hell off that they're a NPE in times like these, but it's a job that's best not lost since she worked for 12 years to get it. Anyone else dealing with this crap?

Can I ask where this is, even generally? Reports without location are frustrating.

(Former journalist that had the five Ws drilled into him)