Coronavirus in N.Y.: ‘Deluge’ of Cases Begins Hitting Hospitals

NY Times ^ | 03-20-2020 | Staff

[NRx]

New York State’s long-feared surge of coronavirus cases has begun, thrusting the medical system toward a crisis point.

In a startlingly quick ascent, officials reported on Friday that the state was closing in on 8,000 positive tests, about half the cases in the country. The number was 10 times higher than what was reported earlier in the week.

In the Bronx, doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center say they have only a few remaining ventilators for patients who need them to breathe. In Brooklyn, doctors at Kings County Hospital Center say they are so low on supplies that they are reusing masks for up to a week, slathering them with hand sanitizer between shifts.

Some of the jump in New York’s cases can be traced to significantly increased testing, which the state began this week. But the escalation, and the response, could offer other states a glimpse of what might be in store if the virus continues to spread. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday urged residents to stay indoors and ordered nonessential businesses to keep workers home.

State officials have projected that the number of coronavirus cases in New York will peak in early May. Both the governor and Mayor Bill de Blasio have used wartime metaphors and analogies to paint a grim picture of what to expect. Officials have said the state would need to double its available hospital beds to 100,000 and could be short as many as 25,000 ventilators.

As it prepares for the worst-case projections, the state is asking retired health care workers to volunteer to help. The city is considering trying to turn the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a makeshift hospital.

[Kozak]

Italians are in general healthier then Americans. They have a significantly longer life span. Comorbidities for poor outcome include obesity, cardiovascular disease, DM and chronic pulmonary disease, hardly rare in the US.

IIlness lags infection, hospitalization lags illness, and need for ICU care lags hospitalization. This is why I believe the ERs are going to be absolutely slammed in 2 weeks.

We have no reason to believe we are not on the exact same trajectory as Italy,and now Spain and France.



The presidents action closing us to travel from China bought us 6 weeks we wasted thanks to the CDC. Now the cats out of the bag and there's not much we can do to mitigate this. Your opinion is its not going to be a big deal. All the evidence I can find (including the actions of the White House, watch what they do not what they say) indicate to me we are about to see something unprecedented in our lifetimes. One of us is going to be right and I hope to God it's you.

[freeandfreezing]

And both of these postulates would be excellent news.

There is another possible explanation of the data, which is also excellent news.

The time we had in the USA before large scale transmission began to occur allowed more knowledge of treatment techniques to disseminate and be put into use.

Our doctors have the advantage of results learned the hard way in China, France, Italy, Korea and Japan. It may well be that some of those treatment techniques are driving down the fatality rate.

The rapid dissemination of research papers built upon the incredible technology of the internet has enabled that. The doctors in the USA that I know are very adept at incorporating new methods into their practice.

[bramps]

I am too intelligent to give credence to the Lame Stream Media. OTOH, you are obviously a sheep who believes every lie the NYT, CNN and the other propaganda outlets vomit out. Sucks to be you.

I hope you will be happy when the economy crashes and Biden is elected in November.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The irony of your post. You mock me and say my thinking will get Biden elected. Yet I’m just following what TRUMP and the experts he has put in charge are saying IF YOU ARE WILLING TO LISTEN. So according to your logic, Trump is trying to get Biden elected also.

[mdmathis6]

Stop using total cases....it only becomes valid at the end of the pandemic. We use the total of recovered plus the dead which is known as resolved or closed cases while the epidemic is ongoing because it tells us how mitigation is working and of the virulence. You divide the number of dead/completed cases(dead + recovered) to get your running death percentage. The link I gave you has a chart that breaks it down.

The US infection is not declining yet...use the link I gave you. NYc is having more covid cases coming into their hospitals than they can handle. The danger also isn’t merely about a 1-4 percent death rate....it is about the 20 percent of covid patients needing hospitalization with a sudden surge of admissions in addition to all the other sick people already there. And that we will know about in a week or so, whether or not our mitigation strategies will start to cap the numbers of ongoing active cases to keep things manageable or if things go crazy like they are in Italy. If we get a surge of patients going into the hospitals with sudden respiratory distress needing quick ventilation then we are in trouble. Regions with little covid activity I suspect and fear will have patients transported into their regions where beds are being underutilized.

So pray....I’ve been a critical RN for 34 years and I’m used to not letting hopeful sentiment get in the way of looking hard at numbers. The world wide numbers are stark. If the US numbers cap to an ongoing 50000(an equilibrium of active and completed or resolved cases) active cases at a time and stay there for a few months before dropping off...it will be manageable and perhaps they can start relaxing the nation’s economic sphincters by June.

[gleeaikin]

I think there were quite enough Chinese going back for the holidays there would be no need to deliberately send us carriers. My student renter returned from China on Jan. 27. She was careful about keeping social distance once I explained how concerned we were here in the US. So far as I know she is still disease free. I’m wondering how many of the New York City cases are returned Chinese who were only visiting over the holidays.

[gleeaikin]

Germany will not be another Italy. Here is an old joke to pass on for a badly needed laugh.

Two guys are at a party. One says to the other, a psychologist, I’ll pay you $1000 if you can get everyone to jump into the pool. The psychologist claps his hands and says, “Hey folks, now let’s have some real fun, everyone jump into the pool.”
There are now only 3 people standing on the ground. Guy asks the psychologist, “not bad, but what about those 3?” Psychologist, “No problem watch this and he goes and whispers in each one’s ear.” One by one they jump into the pool. Guy says, “That was impressive, what did you say to them?
Psychologist, “To the American I said, ‘There is a $300 gold piece in the bottom of the pool.’” “I told the Frenchman, ‘If you do not jump in you will not be fashionable.’” “And to the Brazilian, ‘It is forbidden to swim in this pool.’”

Italians and Brazilians have a lot in common.

Another true life case. A friend and I had accepted a ride to a club from a Yugoslav man (almost 40 years ago). We stopped for a light and then the car would not start. A policeman came by and did something that had the car running again. As he left the policeman said, “Whatever you do, don’t turn off the engine until you get where you are going.” When we got in the driver turned off the engine and we were again stuck. My friend whispered to me, “Why the hell did he turn off the motor?” I responded, “Because he is a Yugoslav.”

[bramps]

Large population of Yugoslavs on FR.

[null and void]

Chinese bioweapon, troll.

I don't doubt that it is a weaponized corona virus, making this quite literally a cold war!

[null and void]

Stop admitting people over 70. No shortage.

Except, of course, for our politicians.

Nothing but the very best for them!

[null and void]

What’s your plan for what we should be doing as a country?

Tell the truth (yeah, like that will ever happen!).

Let people decide what is their own personal response.

Most people will do nothing. Otherwise healthy people below, say, 45-50 years old are reasonably safe. As long as everyone in this cohort avoids close contact with the elderly this should be OK.

People who assess the risk as high will plan and provide.

We've been hunkered down since early February, because mom is in her 90's, and I'm in my 60's. Pretty much only one weekly grocery run at oh dark hundred on Sunday and occasional scenic drives with no stops to ward off cabin fever.

[gleeaikin]

I am very concerned that no one is talking publicly about the potentials for using high dose intravenous Vitamin C for the serious acute respiratory syndrome phase of Covid-19. Last night I spoke with my son who is about to leave for Afghanistan for months. He told me Google is blocking You-Tube videos about Chinese research on using high dosage Vitamin C to save people from the acute respiratory distress of serious Covid-19 infection. I thought he must be wrong, even though being in Special Forces he has access to information I do not. So, today I checked and found that indeed his information appears to be correct. This link provides information and links for further exploring the Covid-19 research efforts. However, I am quoting this article below the link for the critical censorship issue.

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2020/03/three-intravenous-vitamin-c-research-studies-approved-for-treating-covid-19/

“News of vitamin C research for COVID-19 is being actively suppressed

Anyone saying that vitamin therapy can stop coronavirus is already being labeled as “promoting false information” and promulgating “fake news.” Even the sharing of verifiable news, and direct quotes from credentialed medical professionals, is being restricted or blocked on social media. You can see sequential examples of this phenomenon at my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/themegavitaminman .
Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has, literally, met with Google and Facebook and other media giants to stop the spread of what they declare to be wrong information. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/02/14/facebook-google-amazon-met-with-who-to-talk-coronavirus-misinformation.html?__twitter_impression=true
Physician-directed, hospital-based administration of intravenous vitamin C has been marginalized or discredited. Scientific debate over COVID-19 appears to not be allowed.
Ironically, Facebook, blocking any significant users’ sharing of the news of approved vitamin therapy research, is itself blocked in China by the Chinese government. As for the internet, yes, China has it. And yes, it is censored. But, significantly, the Chinese government has not blocked this real news on how intravenous vitamin C will save lives in the COVID-19 epidemic. Here is the protocol as published in Chinese: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v16n11-chi.shtml
Medical orthodoxy obsessively focuses on searching for a vaccine and/or drug for coronavirus COVID-19). While they are looking for what would be fabulously profitable approaches, we have with vitamin C an existing, plausible, clinically demonstrated method to treat what coronavirus patients die from: severe acute respiratory syndrome, or pneumonia.
And it is available right now.”

One article downgrading the possible value of high Vitamin C treatment spoke of potentially “fatal” doses of C. The only info I could find on that was for rats. It said 50% (LD50) of rats were killed by almost 1/2 ounce of C for a 2 pound rat. Multiplied to human terms, that means 2 pounds of Vitamin C for a large woman or small man would kill 1/2 the group. Can you imagine even swallowing 2 pounds of Vitamin C??? A poison control group said they know of NO deaths caused by C.

[gleeaikin]

I included your name on the above comment, but it said I was wrong so I changed it to Kojak and it posted???

[null and void]

Dr. Birx now estimates the US mortality rate to be .7%

US 278 Total deaths
US 147 Total Recovered

Yeah that looks like 0.7% mortality of the completed cases!

Let’s be fair and use her formula:

US 278 Total deaths/
US 22,043 Total Confirmed
=1.26% Fatality rate (I think my data is more recent than the set she’s using, 8:43 this morning per JHU CSSE)

to calculate the survival rate:

US 147 Total Recovered/
US 22,043 Total Confirmed
=0.66% survival rate

Maybe using the textbook formula historical epidemics where EVERYONE who was infected has finished the disease process dosen’t work all that well where most of the patients are barely started on their path?

[Persevero]

Yes there is a difference in the immediacy.

Still we seem to accept that “480,000” are going to die from smoking related this year without destroying everyone’s livelihoods over it.

[Fledermaus]

Blah blah

[null and void]

Here is what we do know. There is no 11% mortality rate world-wide.

Per JHU CSSE, at 10:43 PDT today: of RESOLVED cases:

12,755 deaths/
91,540 recovered
⇒13.9%

Correct, that is not 11%

[mdmathis6]

I don’t think anyone denies to the beneficial effects of vitamin c in immune health. The Human body has a certain absorption capacity for vitamins as needed. It will take what is needed and discard the rest. Now humans often may be in short supply of various nutrients and it certainly is helpful during the stress of illness to “beef up” one’s nutrients to optimum levels. Yet megadoses beyond the RDA’s are what is in question, whether or not there is a true efficacy or not. Some vitamins can be toxic at high levels beyond what is needed.

So I’m in favor of simply supplementing if possible during illnesses and stress. I don’t think a large dose of ascorbic acid iv hurts anything but the body will discard what it doesn’t need anyway!

[mdmathis6]

I don’t think anyone denies to the beneficial effects of vitamin c in immune health. The Human body has a certain absorption capacity for vitamins as needed. It will take what is needed and discard the rest. Now humans often may be in short supply of various nutrients and it certainly is helpful during the stress of illness to “beef up” one’s nutrients to optimum levels. Yet megadoses beyond the RDA’s are what is in question, whether or not there is a true efficacy or not. Some vitamins can be toxic at high levels beyond what is needed.

So I’m in favor of simply supplementing if possible during illnesses and stress. I don’t think a large dose of ascorbic acid iv hurts anything but the body will discard what it doesn’t need anyway!

[grey_whiskers]

Smoking is voluntary and conscious.

[null and void]

Oops!

That should be:

12,755 deaths/
(91,540 recovered+12,755 deaths)
⇒12.2%

Sorry. I'm pretty fried...