It’s true that we learned more about the type of lung damage as things went on, but I still feel like that ventilator conversation was really implausible in hindsight. I’m not an expert, but experts seemed suspiciously quiet, and it should have been obvious to many of them that there were major practical concerns. Accounts from other countries seemed to suggest that ventilators were a poor choice for a significant number of COVID-19 patients, but all our resources seemed to go in that direction, rather than the seemingly obvious fact that you have to keep it out of the nursing homes rather than send people to nursing homes to clear beds for ventilator patients.
The average nursing home resident will not survive ventilation. I remember reading an interview with an Italian doctor saying he’d never put his elderly father on one. We knew COVID-19 damaged lungs, and that lung damage complicates ventilation. I caught on relatively early that they were being overhyped only because I stumbled across two online accounts by technicians trained to operate ventilators, which is apparently a pretty delicate task that most healthcare workers aren’t great at, especially in these severe and unpredictable cases. There clearly weren’t enough of them to put vast numbers of people on ventilators, and ventilators are serious equipment, with serious effects and high fatality rates, to be used as a last resort, not the panacea they were portrayed as. It seemed like a distraction from more practical attempts we could have taken to improve the overall situation. The average person can be forgiven for not seeing this, but even just reading about SARs should have been enough to raise more questions in my mind.
It’s true that we learned more about the type of lung damage as things went on, but I still feel like that ventilator conversation was really implausible in hindsight. I’m not an expert, but experts seemed suspiciously quiet, and it should have been obvious to many of them that there were major practical concerns. Accounts from other countries seemed to suggest that ventilators were a poor choice for a significant number of COVID-19 patients, but all our resources seemed to go in that direction, rather than the seemingly obvious fact that you have to keep it out of the nursing homes rather than send people to nursing homes to clear beds for ventilator patients.
The average nursing home resident will not survive ventilation. I remember reading an interview with an Italian doctor saying he’d never put his elderly father on one. We knew COVID-19 damaged lungs, and that lung damage complicates ventilation. I caught on relatively early that they were being overhyped only because I stumbled across two online accounts by technicians trained to operate ventilators, which is apparently a pretty delicate task that most healthcare workers aren’t great at, especially in these severe and unpredictable cases. There clearly weren’t enough of them to put vast numbers of people on ventilators, and ventilators are serious equipment, with serious effects and high fatality rates, to be used as a last resort, not the panacea they were portrayed as. It seemed like a distraction from more practical attempts we could have taken to improve the overall situation. The average person can be forgiven for not seeing this, but even just reading about SARs should have been enough to raise more questions in my mind.
I feel like experts were suspiciously silent about a lot of things.
Tell me about more of the things expers weren’t talking about.