Doctors were freaking out at very low finger-clip O2 saturation of patients who were not in respiratory distress and still coherent. Put them on ventilator.
Cranked the ventilator too high trying to get them above 90% saturation. Killed them trying.
There was no need to put them on ventilator at all, as O2 saturation for hospitalized SARS-2 patients is a very, very bad indicator. Those poor patients needlessly intubated and mecanically ventilated represented over half of deaths in the first few months, and were perfectly avoidable.
Do you remember the first dude dead after the contamination event at a Miami gay pride festival? ( lung AIDS, not ass AIDS )
He was texting perfectly coherent messages to his buddy to say the doctor was putting him on a ventilator. That's probably what killed him.
Funny, because all anyone could talk about was a "ventilator shortage" in the early months.
Almost like the "shortage" had nothing to do with the number of ventilators and everything to do with an at-best-misguided attempt to ventilate everyone with the WuFlu.
I've tried pointing this out (alas, without the facts) to people, only to be called a conspiracy theorist, etc.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it was almost a given that the death rate would drop over time.
In February, we were caught by surprise, and had no idea what the most effective techniques and treatments were for helping infected people. We now have the benefit of 8 months of experience — it would be an educated guess to assume we'd figure out how to treat it faster than it would mutate into a deadlier variant.
Secondly, the most susceptible and at risk would have been infected and recovered (or passed away) first. It would be unreasonable to look at the statistics as some sort of flat constant graph.
TL;DR : Ventilation was a bad idea.
Doctors were freaking out at very low finger-clip O2 saturation of patients who were not in respiratory distress and still coherent. Put them on ventilator.
Cranked the ventilator too high trying to get them above 90% saturation. Killed them trying.
There was no need to put them on ventilator at all, as O2 saturation for hospitalized SARS-2 patients is a very, very bad indicator. Those poor patients needlessly intubated and mecanically ventilated represented over half of deaths in the first few months, and were perfectly avoidable.
Do you remember the first dude dead after the contamination event at a Miami gay pride festival? ( lung AIDS, not ass AIDS )
He was texting perfectly coherent messages to his buddy to say the doctor was putting him on a ventilator. That's probably what killed him.
Funny, because all anyone could talk about was a "ventilator shortage" in the early months.
Almost like the "shortage" had nothing to do with the number of ventilators and everything to do with an at-best-misguided attempt to ventilate everyone with the WuFlu.
Well, thank God that the shortage existed. It probably saved lives.
I've tried pointing this out (alas, without the facts) to people, only to be called a conspiracy theorist, etc.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it was almost a given that the death rate would drop over time.
In February, we were caught by surprise, and had no idea what the most effective techniques and treatments were for helping infected people. We now have the benefit of 8 months of experience — it would be an educated guess to assume we'd figure out how to treat it faster than it would mutate into a deadlier variant.
Secondly, the most susceptible and at risk would have been infected and recovered (or passed away) first. It would be unreasonable to look at the statistics as some sort of flat constant graph.