I agree with you. We need time

Total cases in the US are doubling every 2 days. Total deaths are doubling about every 2.5 days.

This has the potential to look much worse for the US in 1 week. Like Italy bad.

I am now truly worried about this for the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_the_United_States

From Slashdot user Dunbal about ventilators. Pretty useful (and troublesome) info coming from Slashdot for a change. ?

Ahh yes the ventilators. Don't get me started on the ventilators. First off - I'm a doctor. General practitioner. And I know how a ventilator works and what it's supposed to do, the functions it's capable of, etc - in principle - but I wouldn't trust myself to run one. They require a training course that lasts quite a few days. So ventilators doesn't suddenly mean you have all the staff qualified to use them.

The other thing about ventilators that non medical people don't realize is that they're not a magic bullet. If you need to be put on a ventilator - you are really fucked, health wise. Putting you on the ventilator can save your life, and it does save lives. However putting the ELDERLY on ventilators usually means you can never get them off. Someone on mechanical ventilation for more than 3 days or so is bound to develop pneumonia. It's a fact of life from having an endotracheal tube getting full of saliva and bacteria 24/7 and you can aspirate all you want - you're still going to get bacteria down to the lungs. Tracheostomy helps, but it's still a foreign body exposed to the environment, needs to be cleaned, and the risk of secondary infection is very high. So these infections will run rampant in your elderly patients - ON TOP of their existing COVID-19 infection/pneumonitis, and on top of any other underlying medical condition(s). You'll be lucky not to be ventilating a corpse after a week or so - assuming they don't die of sepsis first.

THEN there's the part that when you're on a ventilator you stop breathing for yourself. The machine breathes for you. And strangely enough it's not easy to get back into the habit of breathing. For someone young, and someone who hasn't been on a ventilator for a long time, it's easier to regain this reflex. But the elderly have an especially hard time managing it. So they need to be "weaned" off the ventilator. That means the machine can sense when the person is trying to take a breath, and it allows the person to make the effort and breathe for themselves. If the person doesn't breathe at a satisfactory rate, the machine then provides the missing breaths. Weaning the elderly off of mechanical ventilation can easily take WEEKS. And during all this time they're exposed to all those infection risks - not to mention bed sores, etc. Oh and those infections of course tend to be the nosocomial kind - with resistant organisms.

So no - more ventilators is a political thing. It is not going to solve many problems. Sure, it might save a few people - but what you will end up having is a population of elderly people stuck on ventilators for god knows how many months until they start dying off from infections, strokes, their underlying conditions, etc. The HARD choice that needs to be made is: who do you allow on the ventilator in the first place. If you put grandma - that machine is unavailable for 2 months or more. The younger guy - he might be better by the end of the week. This is a tough call, an ethical call, and not many are willing to make it. It's easier to ask for more ventilators.

@fleabay Interesting read.

I know my government got more ventilators (if I'm not mistaken there is around 1400 in our country, but only around 1000 is available - as the other are currently used by the patients in hospitals, and are needed for patients with other diseases). I second him for easier option of getting more ventilators as opposed to make ethical call who is going to live and who isn't (also as a doctor you are ethically bound to still try to save everyone you can).

I personally am more worried about not knowing that I'm infected and accidentally spreading disease (which is the reason why I decided to lock myself down and keep physical contact with other people to minimum) … a good advice would be “get tested”, yeah…:

Tests eligibility here is a joke - you can't get immediately tested unless you were abroad in “risk countries” (or unless you would have like severe pneumonia and call emergency number), you can queue when you have symptoms though (high temperature is a must though) … which currently takes over week of waiting (last person in media said 9 days before test, he was infected … before he got to test he literally got out of it, had flu-like symptoms for a week in total, wasn't abroad, he home quarantined himself - had to pay for test as he wasn't eligible), in a week after symptoms you will either:

• Have mild or asymptomatic progress of disease and technically be cured after that period
• Have moderate severity, which is described as “similar to harsh flu”, so you still won't be able to walk for the test (and 7 days after first symptoms you will probably either already be better, or call emergency)
• Have severe progress of disease, in which case you will still get hospitalized with emergency

Now … the whole symptoms is a joke, it literally says: Coughing and sore throat are likely (it is freaking March, everyone has these symptoms due to weather), temperature may be normal or up to 38C (this is about as helpful as long term weather forecast).

Same here, stuck here at home and can only go out to buy food and necessities. For now, what I can do is to do cleaning the house, and I am happy that my mother decided to buy Toto Legato toilets https://bestflushingtoilets.org/toto-toilet/toto-legato-toilet-reviews/ because I clean them with ease and they have a powerful flushing system which really helps.

Well so a lot of parts of the US are now saying that we are on lockdown until the 10th of June. And Fauci has released some very grim predictions. I'm doing my best to avoid the news at this point and am focusing on just coping with being at home all the time. Who knows? I might even pick up game dev again at this rate (mostly just an artist these days).

Also @fleabay, while I don't really want to derail this into politics, I feel like that that blurb doesn't really get at the whole story either. There are a fair number of people who would survive with ventilator support, but won't now because there aren't enough ventilators to go around. That and there's a critical shortage of a lot of different medical supplies, not limited to ventilators.

deltaKshatriya said:
There are a fair number of people who would survive with ventilator support, but won't now because there aren't enough ventilators to go around.

80% of NYC's coronavirus patients who are put on ventilators ultimately die, and some doctors are trying to stop using them