COVID 19: The Ventilator Capacity Issue. What. The. F. Are. We. Doing.
From the start of the COVID 19 Pandemic, one of the key drivers of the “shut down” policy was to avoid overwhelming healthcare systems with at-risk ICU patients, who need ventilators.
It is irrefutable that Corona and the shut down policy response could lead to one of the worst global economic recessions or depressions in the history of recessions or depressions. All one has to do is Google “Fed Powell Coronavirus” or “IMF Coronavirus” to see what policy makers and pundits are saying.
It is also fairly clear that, while the shut down policy may be conventional wisdom among the media and policymakers, it does not enjoy consensus support among the top minds in epidemiology. For evidence of that please Google the following names “and Coronavirus”:
Dr. John P.A. loannidis (Stanford University)
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi (Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Germany)
Dr. David Katz (Yale University)
Professor Johan Giesecke (Karolinska Institute, Sweden)
Moreover, it is clear from data, including from our own CDC, who is most at risk of death from COVID 19. There is no question that COVID 19 is disproportionately life threatening to certain age groups and/or groups that have certain preexisting health conditions. The below CDC link contains various data sets that support that statement: COVID-19 Provisional Counts — Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics
So… What about ventilators? Are they even worth the shut down? Well, it now seems clear that ventilators are not necessarily an effective treatment for keeping the sickest COVID 19 patients alive. Any of the following links (and several others) support that statement:
From Lancet: Respiratory support for patients with COVID-19 infection — The Lancet Respiratory Medicine
Time Magazine: Why Ventilators May Not Be Working Well for COVID-19 Patients | Time
The New York Times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp5RMutCNoI
Ok, ok but what if the shut down strategy itself became more about being a prophylactic against the spread of the disease?
If that is the case, then I have four questions. Do I need to answer them? Can you?
- Did we need and do we need to cause the harm to our economy, our own policy makers are saying we are doing, in order to effectively protect the at-risk populations from getting and dying from COVID 19? (I suggested another option in this linked Medium article, I’m sure there are other/better suggestions: https://link.medium.com/DZuVmhtTP6 )
- Is it even feasible to continue a shut down policy until a truly effective treatment or vaccine is widely available? For three months? For six months? Twelve? Eighteen? (Dr. Katz, in The NY Times, and Dr. Ashish Jha, Harvard University, and Dr. Aaron Carroll, Indiana University, in The Atlantic, both suggest the danger of Coronavirus spreading again as soon we reopen, particularly in the Fall and Winter.) See below links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing.amp.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/how-we-beat-coronavirus/608389/
3. Is the shut down policy even effectively preventing the spread of the disease, at least in the United States? Do we even know the true infection rate? Have we been getting reliable random data? Dr. Ioannidis and others have decried the dearth of reliable data and have suggested that, what reliable data we have gotten points to a higher infection rate and lower death rate than we previously thought. See below link from STAT News:
4. What. The. F. Are. We. Doing.?
