And to address your previous post about measles and TB being more contagious, you’re correct. Their R0 (R naught) numbers are significantly higher than COVID-19. But you’re missing key points:
Measles was largely eradicated in the US until the antivaxxers decided to stop vaccinating (don’t even get me started on that). And the vaccine lasts a lifetime in over 95% of vaccinated people.
TB has well established treatments that significantly improve mortality rates. It’s easy to spot with PPDs, chest X-rays, and quantiferon blood tests that are widely available in any lab or hospital.
The problem with COVID-19 is it’s new. We do not have a vaccine, symptoms vary from completely asymptomatic to severe, and the disease course is frightening.
It’s anecdotal, but I just had a patient die of COVID-19 last night. He was walking to the restroom, talking to his nurses and doctors, and his oxygen saturations were very good, though he required supplemental oxygen to maintain that. None of his labs showed anything too concerning in terms of sepsis or distributive shock. 1 hour later we’re taking his body down to the morgue and telling his brother over the phone that he passed away.
To be honest, the disease course is stunning. Of the covid deaths I’ve personally seen, these people aren’t just decompensating. They’re literally dropping dead.
And it’s not as easy as intubating patients and giving ventilator support. And as we’re seeing studies from the U.K. with a cohort of 3800 ICU patients, they’re reporting about a 66% mortality rate of COVID-19 ventilated patients (n=around 1000). That’s a huge jump from a typical viral pneumonia ventilator mortality rate of 35% from 2017-2019.
https://www.icnarc.org/DataServices/Attachments/Download/c31dd38d-d77b-ea11-9124-00505601089b
Honestly, we used to just intubate patients in the past with hypoxic respiratory failure, but with the slew of poor outcomes, our ER and ICU teams have been reluctant to intubate COVID-19 patients.
There’s mulling around the medical community that we need to change the way we ventilate these patients or that we need to change our thinking fundamentally about whether we even put them on a ventilator to give them a fighting chance.