“We don’t have anything like that to guide us through this Covid business so we have to use best evidence to guide our practice. Physicians can’t really just do whatever they want.”
To some extent they can.
They can send you home and not give you a darn thing until you need to be hospitalized because there aren’t XZY studies proving XYZ..and you can end up dead
Or
They can say I can prescribe this to you. It may help. It is off label.
I would rather a Dr let me try Ivermectin rather than have to go to court to force them to try to save my life with it..or have to sneak in horse paste.
And that's what they do and it is appropriate. It's battlefield triage. Most of the people they send home are still waiting on the Covid test results when they leave. If they're sick enough to need to be admitted, they get a rapid test. If they're positive they go the Medsurg Covid Unit or the ICU Covid unit depending on bad they are.
It takes 1-2 days to get test results back. We tell them to stay home and quarantine until the results come back and to return if they develop worsening symptoms. It was my job to call them up and give them their results. I would talk to them at length and if I felt they were worsening, encouraged them to come back. I saw that a couple did and we'e admitted for a few days.
About half the people I talked to were 20-30 year olds and they did fine. The older folks were more likely to be admitted or to return and they did fine ultimately too. Some of the older folks seemed to get hit harder than others.
Very few people are dying in my hospital from this disease at this point. Most all of them go home. they won't tell us how many people are dying but I can see that most of them aren't.
It was a different story back in wave 1 though. My county is like the 5th biggest county in the state but we were leading the state in Covid deaths for the first 6 months or so. I think they figured out what they're doing by now because that is no longer the case. We have a lot of nursing homes and they were all immediately overwhelmed.