Yeah at some point we either hit capacity or the hospitalized death rate goes way up. I’ve heard talk about basically making med school students temporary doctors and nurses to get through the winter. I’m sure that also drives up the mortality rate, but it may be our best bet.
The med student stuff is not really relevant. There was talk about it or whatever, but it was always dumb and not really what happened even in the hardest hit peaks.
Really the biggest thing that was done where I worked was to have the residents get a big step up in responsibility. Not ideal, but our hospital pushed residents a few months from graduation into essentially fully independent roles. It wasn’t much of a step up tbh.
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From my limited understanding ICU nurses have to do extensive training on the various ICU equipment. Could other nurses be trained to use it? Sure, but bringing newbies into that environment is going to be rough. Seasoned ICU nurses are getting wrecked trying to handle 2-3 Covid patients at a time.
So it might be better than nothing but it won’t be as good as a seasoned ICU nurse. How much worse I am not qualified to say. Like Caffeine said we have a finite supply of nurses and specifically ICU trained nurses. Once those are used up the mortality rate will soar. We have to be close to that a lot of places from what I hear from my wife and her friends and the insane high travel nursing contracts being offered.
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I’m just utterly heartbroken to see people going through what we went through in NYC.
It’s inexcusable.
I average a nightmare or so per week from that. The most common one is me holding up a phone to an old italian man’s ear before I intubated him. The guy made it out of the ER, but was transferred to another hospital. I have no idea if he lived or died. I know now it was wrong to intubate him then.
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Interesting that here in Aus they were mobilising med students in March- obviously turned out they were completely unnecessary and it was likely a waste of space/resources in the hospitals.
Totally agree. What I was told comes from a guy in my poker game who’s on the business side of a medical facility, but not a place treating covid. He said they want to basically get med students doing basic stuff like checking vitals and administering IVs so they can free others up to do more of the advanced stuff.
CaffNeeded could speak more intelligently about how that would or would not work, obviously. I think there was also talk of having experienced but non-ICU nurses go to the ICU and having the students take over for the non-ICU stuff.
Any way you slice it I can only imagine it’s a significant drop off in care and a significant step up from the alternative. Not to knock students who will be doing something noble to the best of their abilities, but obviously experience matters.
Yeah I know my levels of sadness and rage over this so I can’t even imagine yours. It’s also so wrong what we’ve done to medical professionals. You guys got is through an absolute crisis in the spring and bought us months to prepare and instead we doubled down on stupidity, now you’re all being asked to do it again - only worse.
Hopefully at least the hardest hit places from the first wave don’t get as bad this time.
You did the best thing you could given what you knew at the time, that’s all anyone could do. When this is over I hope everyone involved in front line care gets the support they need to deal with the mental side of this.
Hopefully that guy made it, and I’m sure you’ve made calls that saved lives in COVID-19 patients. Remember that too.
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It’s completely insane that this is unfolding with zero hope of any federal response for over two months and a President and half the country worried about a literal alternate universe where the election was stolen.
Bad news: My nephew (and the rest of his family) are currently quarantined and awaiting test results after one of his classmates tested positive.
Good news: He’s apparently still in good spirits. He just had the following convo with my brother:
- Hey Dad?
- Yes, son?
- Why does President Trump hate raccoons?
- I don’t know, why?
- Because they always wear masks!
Variance: His parents are now fully locked down with 2 kids and a massive supply of candy that was purchased at a post Halloween sale.
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My decision to be so strict since March has definitely been at least 50% in consideration of essential workers and how our actions effect their lives.
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Jesus fucking Christ. No liability shield, period.
https://twitter.com/tvietor08/status/1329244603757727746?s=21
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In Australia we have a comedy group that run a website who will call up any News Corp publication, wait on hold and cancel on ,your behalf.
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- John Casey, an upper-level manager at the plant, is alleged to have explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Casey reportedly referred to COVID-19 as the “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry about it because “it’s not a big deal” and “everyone is going to get it.” On one occasion, Casey intercepted a sick supervisor who was on his way to be tested and ordered him to get back to work, saying, “We all have symptoms — you have a job to do.” After one employee vomited on the production line, managers reportedly allowed the man to continue working and then return to work the next day.
Um, yeah. Totally gross! You’ll never find that in my freezer! No sirree Bob.
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I genuinely hope this is not sarcasm.
When I was a kid Tyson and Perdue were two brands mom always refused to buy because of how unsanitary their plants are. Also she absolutely never bought ground beef.
It’s weird to have such a strong opinion about formed and breaded chicken bits. I’m honestly unsure what I am supposed to be horrified by here.
My opinion about Tyson is more due to their union busting practices. Perdue may be just as bad, but due to circumstances I just happened to know a lot about Tyson doing this back in the early nineties and it always stuck with me to avoid them. (Although my wife still buys the shit occasionally even though I’ve asked her a dozen times to not purchase their products.)