Must read article from Denver Post today:
States’ patchwork of crisis plans could mean uneven COVID-19 care, but Colorado among the best – The Denver Post
A few snippets: ( BBM for
@firebird )
“A possible coronavirus pandemic could overwhelm the nation’s hospitals and force doctors into difficult decisions about how to allocate limited resources. Yet, experts say, only a handful of states have done the work necessary to prepare for such worst-case scenarios.
How would hospitals handle overflowing emergency rooms? What would doctors do if they ran out of medicines or ventilators? How would they decide who gets prioritized if they can’t treat everyone?”
[...]
“In worst-case scenarios, doctors may have to make decisions about who will die and who will live. To be sure, those discussions are not easy.
“They do make politicians nervous because we actually have to set out specific resource allocation schemes,” Hodge said.”
[...]
“For example, ethicists have debated what doctors should do if they run out of ventilators during a flu or coronavirus pandemic. The machines help people with respiratory infections breathe and are often the difference between life and death for critically ill patients. Even with a national emergency stockpile of ventilators, the U.S. health system has only so much capacity.
Doctors may be forced to consider whether to take a ventilator away from a patient who isn’t improving to help save another patient who might.”
[...]
“The plans detail how to deal with staffing issues, particularly as health care workers get sick themselves, such as pulling administrators with medical training back into patient care or asking families to help with feeding and personal hygiene. As hospitals swell with patients, they could be doubled up in rooms or moved to conference rooms or other unused space, grouped among less serious cases.”
[...]
“People don’t understand how close the health system runs to capacity every day. We just don’t have the trained staff to staff much beyond what we have now,” Hick said. “Patients are waiting in the emergency department in many cities on a routine basis. Then you talk about adding a pandemic onto that? There are going to be compromises.””
