The Coronavirus Is Forcing American Hospitals to Ration Care - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Hospitals are poised to face the kind of life-and-death decisions that industrialized countries typically encounter only in times of war and natural disaster.
-
wo weeks ago, a man came to an emergency room in New York with pain in the lower-right quadrant of his abdomen.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
The next day, recovering upstairs, the man still had a fever. Doctors ordered a test for the coronavirus. A day later, his results came back positive.
-
Last week, the Illinois Department of Public Health sent a notice to clinics that only those people “hospitalized with severe acute lower respiratory illness” could be tested for the coronavirus
-
Today, if every hospital employee who had a close encounter with a COVID-19 patient disappeared for two weeks, the medical workforce would quickly become depleted
-
The virus has an average incubation period of five days, which means people can spread it in the absence of symptoms
-
After the man with appendicitis (a patient of one of the doctors I spoke with for this story) tested positive, the hospital implemented such precautions. And staff members who’d cared for him went into two weeks of isolation.
-
The majority of workers who keep America’s hospitals running don’t have the salary to afford extra bedrooms, much less extra properties
-
During World War II, Ford and General Motors rallied to the cause by building tanks and manufacturing ammunition instead of car
-
The ubiquitous curve is being flattened by shutdowns and social distancing, but it is not flat enough. Those who might end up in a hospital, which is to say all of us, can do at least one thing to help relieve pressure on the medical system and its overtaxed, dwindling workforce.
-
America rolled the dice. For just one example, the federal government has invested only about $500 million annually in the strategic stockpile, maintaining about 12 million N95 masks and 16,600 ventilators. This is enough to equip an area hit by a localized disease outbreak, natural disaster, or terrorist attack. But it is nowhere near what could be necessary in a Disease X pandemic.
-
In January of this year, some Chinese scientists warned that a Disease X had arrived, based on genetic sequencing they’d performed.
-
When we spoke by phone late Tuesday night, as he was driving home from the hospital, he sounded tired. I asked him to think back to the Disease X war game