Re:US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine
by Izkata on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @03:15PM
(#26797585)
Like a while bunch of places did in March and April last year: build emergency capacity during what was supposed to be only a short several-week lockdown. Instead, when the capacity went mostly unused during the lockdown, it was quietly dismantled and lockdowns continued.
Also, we knew by April last year that ventilators were a bad choice: Doctors were jumping to it because of a specific weird symptom (blood oxygen levels impossibly low), but they had to keep turning the ventilators to higher settings to get an effect - to the point it was causing further lung damage. There's a bunch of less damaging ways to get more oxygen into a patient they'd been shifting to: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...
Additionally, you make a few glib statements that don’t really check out - you say give hospitals three weeks to prepare - how? There’s been a lot made of hospitals getting ready, but for the most part, the limiting factor for covid treatment has been how many icu care teams are available. More ventilators don’t help much if there’s nobody to use them. Second, I’m not sure how you protect senior citizens when everyone else, including the people who provide their care, is swimming in a soup of COVID.