Wulfschilde wrote:
Death rate was higher today (yesterday? I'm not sure how they are tallying this) than the recent days, which were exceptionally low.
Despite all the doomsaying on the internet about how people are going to need lung transplants years from now even though they're asymptomatic or how COVID can cause brain damage, or the scholarly articles saying that protests don't spread COVID but Trump rallies do, the people with money (most of the smart people) are completely ignoring the BS and the stock market is basically running inverse to the death count. Most of this week the death count was low and the markets were going up. Today it's relatively higher but not anything compared to previous highs and the markets are mostly flat, with some winners and some losers.
Also, this is the WHO graph of United States data.
Well, you don't understand it because you have been living in a bubble of FOX news and other crazy right-wing non-news. You are not in the front lines so you clearly don't have first hand information to put shit into context.
One of the things that most young doctors get taught during the first year of practice, internship, is that humans are remarkably resilient. It is definitely a bit macabre to say it, but the reality is that it takes quite a bit for someone to die, specially with modern technology. We can do the kidney's job, dialysis. We can do the Lungs job, ventilator or ECMO machine, we can do the heart's job, ECMO, Vasopressors, fluids, impella device, intraortic balloom pump. We can do the GI (stomach) job, either by directly feeding the gut, or through an IV solution.
The caveat? Well that all of these devices buys time but are not definitive end points. Another caveat is that they are invasive and exposes the patient to complications such as infections, blood clots, bleeding, etc. But usually the complications can be mitigated for a fairly long time, in the order of weeks in many cases.
A relatively young patient, could last months before eventually dying. We saw a very public case with an actor that recently died who spent about 3 months fighting with complications of the coronavirus. Now, the proximal cause of death is not likely to be the coronavirus per se, after all I would have expected that after a couple of weeks the infection itself would be cleared. However, the sequelae and complications remain and that can take a very long time to recover if it does at all.
I can tell you first hand that most patients under my care that made it to the ICU spent close to a month in the ICU, many of them died, other recovered but the ones that died usually took a while to die because we can artificially prolong dying for a while. Make no mistake, this is probably the worse and most traumatic death anyone can experience, in most cases these patients have been away from their families for weeks and even months, without being allowed to receive visitation. If they are conscious at all, they might be lucky and use video chat. Families are devastated.
Healthcare workers are devastated as well, we deal with hard situations all the time, but usually we have the family there... next to the patient... they grief the patient, you see them cry, you keep silent.
It is much easier to detach emotionally from the situation when you have the intellectual understanding of whats going on and the peace of mind that this person that is about to die will be griefed by the family, by their loved ones. It is another history when the emotional rollercoaster stops at your station and you don't have the ability to pass it to the family.
Shame on the leaders of this country that turned a natural disaster into a political hot potato