people who end up intubated stand a real chance of dying.
Hmm. I'm not really trying to argue that you are wrong. I'm currently hunkered down. While I resent what I feel is government overreach in the liberty/safety balance, I'm happy enough to be careful on my own recognizance. But the following had me scratching my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDsKdeFOmQI realize that this is an uncorroborated report, and it is anecdotal if true, at that. But it seems sincere, and has me questioning the entire medical response to this thing. At least in my mind.
edit: I see Tash beat me to it. Whatevs.
Just looked over a few minutes - and it seems the initial premise is that people marked negative for test were still 'presumed' Covid positive.
OK, but... it is entirely plausible that:
1. People were not tested, but obviously suffering classic symptoms.
2. Test results were taking hours (at best) to even come back - if someone is an emergency admission and short of breath at dangerous levels - as a doctor, you need to act and make a decision. I assume we are not arguing that thousands of people were dying.
3. Tests were simply not showing positive, since they were unreliable. A positive test is rarely wrong, but false negatives do exist - tests were then (and are still) not infallible.
Her assertion that they were not ill and were only short of breath 'due to stress' is a bit of a stretch IMHO. Testing being fallible - or (because of time taken to even get results) being skipped in cases where someone is obviously lacking blood oxygen, seems a more likely explanation than deliberately using up ventilators for people with no real need.
Pulse oximeters are ubiquitous in hospitals and damn quick to reliably show dangerously low oxygen levels. People panicking get high results, people short of breath due to pneumonia get low ones.
OK, that ventilators and, in particular intubation, are not the best clinical options
may or may not prove to be the case. At this time there was no better option, since people with not enough oxygen tend to die pretty quickly.
Well, her assertions, had you watched the entire thing, are more extensive than that. To your list, I would add:
- Yes, anyone coming the the hospital complaining of shortness of breath were treated as 'presumed covid'
- anyone presumed covid were placed in the covid population, sealed off from the outside world, yet kept in close proximity to 'affirmed covid'
- pretty much every person who was in this ward were intubated shortly upon arrival, whether or not demonstrating a clinical need for such
- pretty much everyone who was intubated eventually died
- she believes (yes, that's a soft and fuzzy word) that the ventilators themselves were the proximate cause of death,
- and that a significant portion of these dead did not have covid (i.e. repeatedly tested negative)
- the hospital received a princely sum (I forget - $29K?) for every patient intubated
Yes, it is a single anecdotal report. Is there a rebuttal from anyone in the same hospital? As I said, it has me scratching my head.
Plenty of people have recovered after intubation (in my country at least) so saying that all almost died is already a problem (not saying it's not true, but something else must have happened).
Intubated people die in significant number in normal times, because intubated people are gravely ill (aside from routine surgeries of course).
It seems that with COVID, intubation might sometimes cause more harm than good, and positive pressure oxygen therapy should be favored if possible, at least at first.
Blood thinners might help with the blood oxygen issue.
If someone with COVID symptoms died intubated, then it is very likely that they were indeed COVID+.