Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in NYC

Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by zimpenfish on Friday April 24, 2020 @05:17AM (#22966115)

> The lives being saved by flattening are not limited to covid-19 patients requiring intubation.

It's not even about just saving lives if the thing I saw recently about the effects of COVID-19 on survivors is accurate - diminished lung capacity, impaired liver function, possible cardiac issues, possible neurological issues, blood clots that may lead to strokes later, etc.

Currently 750k survivors - health systems could possibly be looking at a generation or more of strain coping with them.

Or we can flatten the curve and reduce the number of infections and thence the number of infected survivors.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by maigret on Friday April 24, 2020 @06:26AM (#22966505)

I think what you mention is completely stopping infections, which is certainly a great goal - albeit a very costly one for many countries which started the right actions too late, too little.

Flattening the curve is only about spreading the same number of infections over time, so that at a given time, the health system is not overwhelmed. It will not reduce the number of infections, and will likely augment the number of survivors, who might have to deal with hard long term consequences.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by DagAgren on Friday April 24, 2020 @07:14AM (#22966773)

It will most definitely reduce the number of infections. It allows us to reach the point of where measures like test-and-trace become possible after a smaller number of infections, and those measures can further suppress and even eradicate the disease before it manages to infect everyone.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by nradov on Friday April 24, 2020 @08:57AM (#22967442)

Testing and tracing would have been a great idea in February when the outbreak could still be contained. Now it's gone too far for that to be practical. So we're likely to end up with ~70% infected eventually (approximate herd immunity limit), it's just a question of when.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by DagAgren on Friday April 24, 2020 @11:14AM (#22968848)

That is the whole point of lockdowns, to bring the outbreak down enough that these methods are reasonable again.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by nradov on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:24PM (#22970657)

You missed the point. Now that infections have spread so far, the level of lockdowns that would be necessary to bring the outbreak down to that level aren't even possible in an open society. But it will be a good approach to try during the early stage of the next pandemic.

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Re:Near 90% Mortality Rate in Intubated Covid-19 Patients in... by zimpenfish on Saturday April 25, 2020 @03:08AM (#22976281)

I admire your optimism that the people in charge might learn from this when they clearly haven't[1] from the last few.

[1] Excepting places like Taiwan, etc., who clearly did learn.

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