Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
I am proud to announce that the United States will donate ventilators to our friends in India. We stand with India and @narendramodi during this pandemic. We’re also cooperating on vaccine development. Together we will beat the invisible enemy!
12:20 AM · May 16, 2020
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Only 0.33% COVID-19 patients are on ventilators, says Harsh Vardhan
(The Hindu, 29 April 2020)
Dr. Vardhan said only 0.33% patients were on ventilators, 1.5% patients on oxygen support and 2.34% patients in ICU, which was a “reflection of the quality of care being provided across the country.”
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New Study Shows Nearly 9 in 10 Covid-19 Patients on Ventilators Don’t Make It
(By Robert Langreth, Bloomberg, 23 April 2020)
*Researchers tracked 2,634 outcomes in NY-area hospitals
*Only 3% of those over 65 on ventilators survived, report says
A giant study that examined outcomes for more than 2,600 patients found an extraordinarily high 88% death rate among Covid-19 patients in the New York City area who had to be placed on mechanical devices to help them breathe.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is one of the largest reviews published to date of Covid-19 patients hospitalized in the U.S. The researchers examined outcomes for coronavirus patients who were admitted between March 1 and April 4 to 12 hospitals in New York City and Long Island that are part of the Northwell Healthsystem.
Overall, the researchers reported that 553 patients died, or 21%. But among the 12% of very sick patients that needed ventilators to breathe, the death rate rose to 88%. The rate was particularly awful for patients over 65 who were placed on a machine, with just 3% of those patients surviving, according to the results. Men had a higher mortality rate than women.
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In New York’s largest hospital system, many coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it
(The Washington Post, By Ariana Eunjung Cha, 27 April 2020)
A total of 1,151 patients required mechanical ventilators. Of the 320 for whom final outcomes are known (either death or discharge), 88 percent died. That compares with about 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies — and with the death rate of about 50 percent that some critical-care doctors had optimistically hoped for when the first cases were diagnosed.
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Ventilators could actually be killing coronavirus patients, feel experts
As health officials around the world push to get more ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, some doctors are moving away from using them whenever they can.
(The New Indian Express, 13th April 2020)
As health officials around the world push to get more ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, some doctors are moving away from using them whenever they can.
That’s because some hospitals have reported unusually high death rates for coronavirus patients on ventilators, and some doctors worry that the machines could actually be harming certain patients.
Death rates for COVID patients on ventilator
80% or more of coronavirus patients placed on the machines in New York City have died, state and city officials say. Higher-than-normal death rates have also been reported elsewhere in the US.
66% was the death rate in UK for coronavirus patients on ventilators, one report said.
86% death rate was found in a small study in Wuhan, China.
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COVID19: Are ventilators killing people?
Intubation and ventilation were billed as the only way to treat Covid19 patients in the early days of the outbreak, but now some medical professionals are questioning the practice.
(Kit Knightly, Off-Guardian, 06 May 2020)
Since the coronavirus first jumped so dramatically from China to Italy, most of the talk in the Western world has been about whether or not our healthcare services will be able to cope with the predicted tidal wave of patients.
A tsunami of human suffering was predicted which, weeks later, is yet to materialise. The NHS built a new 4000-bed emergency hospital, the Nightingale Centre…which was barely used and is now being shut down. In the US field hospitals were erected, left standing empty for a few days, and then taken down.
Most specifically, in the early days, almost all the talk was about ventilators. Did we have enough? Could we get more? Should we 3D print our own? Do we need car companies and arms dealers re-tool their factories to make more?
This media narrative never fit with the real science of the situation.
Many doctors have since come forward to say that mechanical ventilation is not only inappropriate for those with respiratory infections, but that it is being seriously over-used for Covid patients, and that it may be doing more harm than good.
Writing in The Spectator, Dr. Matt Strauss underlined that ventilators were not a “treatment” per se, and were not intended for patients with respiratory diseases:
"Ventilators do not cure any disease. They can fill your lungs with air when you find yourself unable to do so yourself. They are associated with lung diseases in the public’s consciousness, but this is not in fact their most common or most appropriate application."
And goes on to explain that patients may see absolutely no benefit from being on a ventilator:
"There has never been a placebo randomised control trial of putting people on ventilators versus letting them struggle on. We therefore do not, strictly-speaking, know whether those who survive their time on ventilator may have survived anyway, or whether some would-be survivors died because they were committed to a ventilator."
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