With COVID-19 becoming a critical focus in hospital intensive care units, nurses, doctors and other caregivers have had to shift gears to protect staff and save patients.
One of the riskiest ICU procedures is inserting a breathing tube in a COVID-19 patient's airway, which creates a direct path for virus to escape from a patient's lungs."If you're intubating a patient, that's a much higher risk than, say, going in and doing routine patient care," Hewlett says.Extra personal protective equipment may include an N95 respirator, goggles, a full face shield, a head hood, an impermeable isolation gown and double gloves.
"It usually takes 30 minutes or so in order to get all of that equipment together, to get all of the right people there," says, a senior resident physician at UW Medical Center in Seattle."and that would be a particularly fast intubation." There's a growing understanding, for example, that the infection can cause dangerous blood clots to form in many severely ill patients. These clots can kill if they block arteries supplying the lungs or brain. But they also can prevent blood from reaching the kidneys or even a patient's arms and legs.
ICU teams are also recalibrating their approach to ensuring that patients are getting enough oxygen. Early in the pandemic, the idea was to put patients on mechanical ventilator quickly to make sure their oxygen levels didn't fall too far.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Essential farmworkers risk COVID-19 exposure to maintain food supplyCleotilde is a farmworker in Ventura County who wears a colorful bandana to protect her from the sun and pesticides, but since COVID-19 broke out, she also hopes it can protect her from the virus. While many Americans are working from home, farmworkers have continued laboring in fields. Lillian Argueta
Read more »
Innovation Timeline: FinTech vs. Healthcare Covid-19 Crisis SeriesThe 2008 Financial Crisis vs. The Covid-19 Crisis. The third in Stephanie MacConnell's series explores the timeline from the financial crisis to the industry-shaping boom we saw in FinTech following the burst of the housing bubble.
Read more »
COVID-19 Threatens A New Eviction CrisisHousing experts fear an increase in homelessness when the bans on evictions during the coronavirus shutdowns expire.
Read more »
'It's a nightmare': First denied testing, twice denied ER admittance, Iowa man dies of COVID-19“It’s hard not to wonder if he had been taken seriously earlier, if they had intervened sooner, could his lungs have responded better?' Pamela Dennen asked. 'Could he maybe have been spared? I mean, nobody will ever know that.'
Read more »
What it takes to be a COVID-19 contact tracer in NYCOut-of-work New Yorkers looking to secure employment as New York City COVID-19 contact tracers -- tracking the spread of the virus in an effort to contain it during the city's recovery phase -- will need what some might see as a surprising prerequisite. 'Structural racism and inequities have
Read more »