Heart disease, cancer, even broken bones are going untreated.
We really didn’t organize this very well. We should have set up area hospitals explicitly for known covid patients, leaving other hospitals to treat other illnesses both serious and routine. We’re hearing some hospitals are or were overwhelmed, and at the same time other hospitals are going broke because nobody wants to walk into one for fear of catching the virus there. If the hospitals were better quarantined maybe people wouldn’t put off needed treatments and exams. Heck even physical rehab places, which people need to recover from injuries, are off by 50% or more. That can lead to long term problems if you don’t do your physical therapy.
Progressive diseases like cancer are going to go up in the coming years as a result of this. It is axiomatic that the sooner you treat a disease the greater likelihood of a positive outcome. But if you can’t get cancer screening, you won’t know about the cancer, and it can be very aggressive depending on the type. This will make it much harder to treat, and harder on the patient.
Distributed hydroxychloroquine and zinc to everyone, not shut down the economy, quarantined only the sick leaving the healthy alone, and pulled out all the stops to protect the vulnerable population.
Advised, not mandated socialist distancing and hand sanitizing. Masks are just stupid and a waste of masks.
Our hospitals are better organized now. Even those in Houston. The big population hospitals are separating covid patients at the front door, and the emergency front door. When the covid patient area becomes full, many of those patients are sent by ambulance to hospitals set up with more covid resources. Resources like doctors and other staff with antibodies, ventilators, oxygen and PPE.
We are not running out of beds in Houston or anywhere else. We are not close to running out of beds. But as you say, there needs to be a strategy to handle normal patients and another strategy to handle covid patients. And there is. So, covid patients will get moved from full hospitals to specialized covid hospitals. That said there are overflow resources that have not been put into play except in NYC back in March and April. And there they were barely used. We have the VA. We have the large unused arenas and convention facilities. And the army or FEMA can quickly build big tent hospitals like the one built in Central Park. So we are no where nearly tapped out.
If you remember the Mayor in NYC and the Governor of NY State screamed for more beds. Then when Trump produced them, they said they did not need them. Thousands of beds went unused. And NYC had ten times more cases than Texas has.
Tell me about it. My 92 y.o. father was on a monthly infusion regimen of Opdivo blood infusions which hadbeen holding stage IV melanoma in check for 2 years. COVID strikes and he could not get the infusion for 2 months. Scans are taken and the tumors have grown and proliferated, so the Opdivo is stopped. He tries a very small dose of the next best alternative and has terrible adverse reactions to that. It is withdrawn and now he has started palliative care. Impossible to know if the two month interruption was critical in this.