by Facts-Over-Opinion
Backstory – a family member of mine (in law) lives in one of the NYC boroughs. In 2020, he lost a family member to covid (allegedly). Today, his mother passed away from covid (allegedly).
I first heard his mother had covid+pneumonia about 2 weeks ago when I was visiting my family for Christmas. I don’t know the exact timeline of when she tested positive for it etc. I do know that she called an ambulance to take her to the hospital but I know she wasn’t in that abd of health when she called. She most likely called because she was scared/concerned.
She’s in the hospital for a couple days in stable conditions with mild symptoms. Her health was not declining and the symptoms were not getting worse yet they put her in the ICU because “she wasn’t getting any better”. Now I’m not a doctor/nurse but I’ve never heard of someone getting put into the ICU because they ‘weren’t getting better’. From my understanding, patients usually get moved to the ICU when their health is declining rapidly. So she was in the ICU for about 10 days.
I did some research and found some startling findings –
The first is a NYC study done in 2020 that shows patients that were put on ventilators died at a significantly higher rate.
Of patients receiving mechanical ventilation and whose outcomes (discharge or death) were known, 88.1% died. When stratified by age, the mortality rates for ventilated patients were 76.4% for those aged 18-65 years and 97.2% for those older than 65 years.
Among those who did not require mechanical ventilation and whose outcomes (discharge or death) were known, 19.8% of patients aged 18-65 years died, as did 26.6% of those older than 65 years.
I found an article from 2020 where multiple doctors were expressing their concerns around putting covid patients on ventilators.
The article shows that the idea of putting covid patients on ventilators early CAME FROM CHINA
“Data from China suggested that early intubation would keep Covid-19 patients’ heart, liver, and kidneys from failing due to hypoxia,” said a veteran emergency medicine physician. “This has been the whole thing driving decisions about breathing support: Knock them out and put them on a ventilator.”
The other idea around using ventilators comes from non-Covid-19 pneumonia or acute respiratory distress
That’s not unreasonable. In patients who are on ventilators due to non-Covid-19 pneumonia or acute respiratory distress, a blood oxygen level in the 80s can mean impending death, with no room to give noninvasive breathing support more time to work. Physicians are using their experience with ventilators in those situations to guide their care for Covid-19 patients. The problem, critical care physician Cameron Kyle-Sidell told Medscape this week, is that because U.S. physicians had never seen Covid-19 before February, they are basing clinical decisions on conditions that may not be good guides.
Other important info from the article –
The first batch of evidence relates to how often the machines fail to help. “Contrary to the impression that if extremely ill patients with Covid-19 are treated with ventilators they will live and if they are not, they will die, the reality is far different,” said geriatric and palliative care physician Muriel Gillick of Harvard Medical School.
Researchers in Wuhan, for instance, reported that, of 37 critically ill Covid-19 patients who were put on mechanical ventilators, 30 died within a month. In a U.S. study of patients in Seattle, only one of the seven patients older than 70 who were put on a ventilator survived; just 36% of those younger than 70 did. And in a study published by JAMA on Monday, physicians in Italy reported that nearly 90% of 1,300 critically ill patients with Covid-19 were intubated and put on a ventilator; only 11% received noninvasive ventilation. One-quarter died in the ICU; 58% were still in the ICU, and 16% had been discharged.
As patients go downhill, protocols developed for other respiratory conditions call for increasing the force with which a ventilator delivers oxygen, the amount of oxygen, or the rate of delivery, she explained. But if oxygen can’t cross into the blood from the lungs in the first place, those measures, especially greater force, may prove harmful. High levels of oxygen impair the lung’s air sacs, while high pressure to force in more oxygen damages the lungs.
In a letter last week in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers in Germany and Italy said their Covid-19 patients were unlike any others with acute respiratory distress. Their lungs are relatively elastic (“compliant”), a sign of health “in sharp contrast to expectations for severe ARDS.” Their low blood oxygen might result from things that ventilators don’t fix. Such patients need “the lowest possible [air pressure] and gentle ventilation,” they said, arguing against increasing the pressure even if blood oxygen levels remain low. “We need to be patient.”
. In a small study last week in Annals of Intensive Care, physicians who treated Covid-19 patients at two hospitals in China found that the majority of patients needed no more than a nasal cannula. Among the 41% who needed more intense breathing support, none was put on a ventilator right away. Instead, they were given noninvasive devices such as BiPAP; their blood oxygen levels “significantly improved” after an hour or two.
Because U.S. data on treating Covid-19 patients are nearly nonexistent, health care workers are flying blind when it comes to caring for such confounding patients. But anecdotally, Weingart said, “we’ve had a number of people who improved and got off CPAP or high flow [nasal cannulas] who would have been tubed 100 out of 100 times in the past.” What he calls “this knee-jerk response” of putting people on ventilators if their blood oxygen levels remain low with noninvasive devices “is really bad. … I think these patients do much, much worse on the ventilator.”
That could be because the ones who get intubated are the sickest, he said, “but that has not been my experience: It makes things worse as a direct result of the intubation.”
Other related posts/articles –
New York City nurse patients killed by ventilator overuse and neglect
Covid death rates dropped as doctors rejected ventilators
Doctors warn Ventilators Killing covid Patients not Virus
German doctor changes dangerous ventilator protocols to save lives
Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the views of IWB.