Archive for ‘gowns’

10/04/2020

Coronavirus: Inside India’s busiest Covid-19 hospital

IndoreImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Indore is a bustling commercial city

In early March, 40-year-old Ravi Dosi, a chest specialist in India, saw a baffling surge in patients with respiratory problems at outpatient clinics.

“There was almost a 50% jump in patients with upper respiratory issues and sore throat. They were not responding to antibiotics. Testing was still low and we didn’t really know what was going on,” Dr Dosi, who works at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, a 1,156-bed private medical college in the central city of Indore, told me.

Less than a fortnight later, Dr Dosi began seeing an uptick in admissions of Covid-19 patients. Around the end of March, the hospital was receiving 28 infected patients every day.

They had dry cough, fever, and difficulty breathing. Their blood oxygen levels were low. They were reporting loss of taste and smell.

In the first wave of patients, nearly a dozen came from far-flung districts, more than 150km (93 miles) from Indore, a bustling commercial city in Madhya Pradesh state. The state has now become a hotspot, with nearly 400 confirmed infections out of the more than 6,400 infections and nearly 200 deaths across the country so far.

By the second week of April, Dr Dosi and his team of 100 doctors and nearly an equal number of nursing staff working 24/7 in three shifts, were treating 144 Covid-19 patients. (Thirty-one had been treated and sent home already.)

A total of 38 patients were in intensive care. Twenty-one of them were critical. There had been seven deaths. “We are handling the largest number of Covid-19 patients in India,” Vinod Bhandari, a surgeon and chairman of the hospital, told me.

Doctors now believe that the infection was spreading in the community long before the government admitted to it, and testing slowly ramped up. Until two weeks ago, Indian health authorities had been denying community transmission.

SAIMs Hospital Indore
Image caption The hospital in Indore has more than 140 patients

Now a new study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) using surveillance data from 41 labs in the country has hinted at community transmission: 52 districts in 20 states and union territories reported Covid-19 patients. Some 40% of the cases did not report any history of international travel or contact with a known case. (The survey was based on swabs collected from nearly 6,000 patients who tested positive between 15 February and 19 March.)

Back in the hospital in Indore, the doctors are battling the surge in infections.

Three isolation wards spread over two floors floors are stacked with patients. (The hospital has earmarked 525 beds for Covid-19 patients.) Isolation wards have younger patients with mild infection, while elderly patients with more severe symptoms are in intensive care. The oldest patient is a 95-year-old man, and the youngest is a four-month-old boy.

The team of doctors handling patients includes chest specialists, anaesthetists, microbiologists, and dermatologists. There are patients with a lot of underlying medical conditions – diabetes, hypertension, even cancer – so all the specialists have been called in to help with the treatment.

Dr Dosi wakes up early, puts on protective gear – scrubs, face masks and shields, N95 masks, gowns, double gloves and shoe covers – before going on his rounds of the patients. Doctors say they are not facing a shortage of gear yet.

They are using 22 ventilators to help the critical patients breathe, and also providing oxygen supplies to others using nasal cannulas (nose prongs).

In the isolation wards, patients are given oral medication – antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine (commonly known as HCQ), an anti-malarial drug – and directed to maintain social distancing and wash their hands regularly.

Isolation wards
Image caption The isolation wards are packed with patients

“I have never seen a challenge and crisis like this in my career. I have heard stories about an outbreak of plague in Surat [in 1994]. But this seems to be much bigger. The biggest challenge is to keep hopes alive and be positive,” says Dr Dosi.

Keeping hopes up for patients in isolation can be taxing. Three tests, say doctors, are being done for the infection – if the first test comes out positive, the patient remains in isolation for two weeks, and is tested twice on two days after the quarantine period. If the last two tests come back negative, the patient is discharged. If not, the patient has to stay in isolation for another two weeks. “It is a tough grind, mentally,” says one doctor.

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For the last three weeks, Dr Dosi has been living in the hospital, away from his wife, two sons and parents. His father is a retired pathologist. They communicate via hurried video calls, between his frantic trips to the isolation wards and intensive care.

I ask him when does he expect this to “get over”, so that he can go home.

“In a couple of weeks,” he says. “The lockdown should have helped to slow down the infection.”

Dr Dosi is alluding to the strict 21-day lockdown India imposed on 24 March to halt the spread of the infection.

migrant workerImage copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image caption Health officials have been denying community transmission

Things are getting better, he says.

“I am getting 10 patients for admission in isolation wards, and two patients severe enough for intensive care every day now. Earlier this week, it was 50:50.”

It is possibly too early to hazard a guess about when admissions will slow down to single digits. As more people are tested, the number of patients can easily rise again.

It’s been unrelenting, Dr Dosi says.

Early, on Friday, I sent him a text to find out what was going on.

“Please. Have an emergency in ICU,” he replied.

Source: The BBC

29/03/2020

Why are there so few coronavirus infections in Singapore’s health workers?

  • Throughout the world, overworked health care professionals are being infected with Covid-19, yet the Lion City has kept numbers low
  • Preparation, planning, patient ratios and protective equipment have all played a part. Still, even the best gear cannot guard against discrimination
Medical staff walk to the National Centre for Infectious Diseases building at Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore. Photo: AFP
Medical staff walk to the National Centre for Infectious Diseases building at Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore. Photo: AFP
Uncooperative patients, long hours and a lack of protective equipment are hampering health care workers across the world as they take the fight to the coronavirus, leading many to fall sick themselves.
In Malaysia, a pregnant woman who did not disclose that her father was infected tested positive after giving birth, leading to the shutdown of the entire hospital for cleaning. In the Philippines, nine doctors have died, two of whom had dealt with a patient who lied about her travel history.
In Spain, where more than 5,400 health care workers have been infected, accounting for about 14 per cent of the country’s patients, there are no longer enough workers to care for patients.
In Italy, which has more than 69,000 patients, the virus killed a doctor who had no choice but to work without gloves.
In the United States, which has surpassed China to become the world’s most infected nation with more than 83,000 people testing positive for Covid-19, hospitals are being overrun with patients.

Health care staff in the country say patients are packed into emergency wards and intensive care units (ICUs), further raising the risk of infections. They also report shortages of ventilators, face masks, gowns and shields.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on March 7 released interim guidelines saying health care workers exposed to the coronavirus could be asked to return to work as long as they wore face masks and were not showing symptoms, if their employers had no other manpower available.

Malaysian health workers at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Photo: AFP
Malaysian health workers at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Photo: AFP
A REASON FOR OPTIMISM
However, amid all the gloom, Singapore’s experienceis being held up as a reason for optimism. The city state has reported more than 630 cases of infection, all of which are being treated in hospital, yet only a handful of its health care professionals have been infected. What’s more, even these cases, according to Vernon Lee, director of communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health, are thought to have been infected outside the health care setting.

Experts suggest this has been more than just luck, pointing to a case in which 41 health workers were exposed to the coronavirus in a Singapore hospital yet evaded infection.

The workers had all come within two metres of a middle-aged man with Covid-19 who was being intubated, a procedure which involves a tube being inserted into the patient’s trachea. The procedure is seen as being particularly hazardous for health workers as it is “aerosol generating” – patients are likely to cough.

The workers had not known at the time that the man had the virus and all were quarantined after he tested positive. However, on their release two weeks later, none of them had the virus.

Coronavirus: as Malaysia braces for third wave, doctors make their own face masks

27 Mar 2020

The case has come to widespread attention partly because the workers were wearing a mix of standard surgical masks and the N95 mask, which doctors see as the gold standard as it filters out 95 per cent of airborne particles.

The conclusion, published in The Annals of Internal Medicine this month, was this: “That none of the health care workers in this situation acquired infection suggests that surgical masks, hand hygiene, and other standard procedures protected them from being infected.”

Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande mentioned the case in an article for The New Yorker on how health care workers could continue seeing patients without becoming patients. He said there were things to learn from Asia and that some of the lessons came out of the “standard public health playbook”. In other words, there is much to be said for social distancing, basic hand hygiene and cleaning regimens.

A health worker in protective gear walks into a quarantine room at a hospital in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Photo: AFP
A health worker in protective gear walks into a quarantine room at a hospital in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Photo: AFP
COMING TOGETHER
With critical supplies running short in many countries, experts say it is increasingly vital that countries share both knowledge and resources.
To this end, China has been donating personal protective equipment to places including the Philippines, Pakistan and Europe. China’s richest man Jack Ma is donating 1.8 million masks, 210,000 Covid-19 test kits and 36,000 pieces of protective clothing to 10 countries in Asia.
At the same time, doctors are encouraging the Western world to learn from Asia.
Infectious diseases expert Leong Hoe Nam said that being “bitten by Sars” (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 had prepared Asia for Covid-19, while Western countries were not similarly prepared and hence lacked sufficient protective equipment.
He pointed to how about 2,000 health care workers had fallen sick in China early in the outbreak because workers did not initially have protective gear. The trend reversed as equipment became available.
“Once the defences were up, there were very few health care workers who fell sick at work. Rather, they fell sick from contact with sick individuals outside the workplace,” he said.
Malaysia is a case in point. While it has reported 80 health care workers falling ill, most are thought to be community infections.
Coronavirus: Doctor explains the proper way to wash your hands and put on a face mask

In a webinar organised by Caixin Global on Thursday night, Peng Zhiyong, an intensive care specialist at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, shared how they managed a shortage of personal protective equipment early on in the outbreak by rationing workers to two sets of gear per shift.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, doctors from Manila’s Chinese General Hospital held a video conference call with doctors in Zhejiang to learn from China’s experience of treating Covid-19 patients.

Crowdsourcing platforms have also been created to share advice. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has released guidelines for treating critically ill patients and its website includes information from Chinese doctors.

Why Singapore’s coronavirus response worked – and what we can all learn

27 Mar 2020

The Jack Ma Foundation has also launched an online platform for doctors and nurses around the world to share knowledge on fighting the virus. “One world, one fight,” it said in a tweet.

Associate Professor Jeremy Lim from the global health programme at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health said it was crucial for countries to work together.

“Viruses don’t respect borders. Countries have to share information and help each other as we are only as strong as the weakest link. Any country can become a reservoir of disease and the world may then be forced to endure a ping-pong of outbreaks over and over again.”

And the advice of Lee, at Singapore’s Ministry of Health? “Practise good hygiene and wash hands regularly.”

Indonesian medical staff administer mass testing for Covid-19 in Bekasi, West Java. Photo: AFP
Indonesian medical staff administer mass testing for Covid-19 in Bekasi, West Java. Photo: AFP
SINGAPORE, A CASE STUDY
Amid this sharing of advice, it is often Singapore that is held up as an example to replicate. Despite the country grappling with a rising load of Covid-19 patients, most of whom have recently returned to the city state from abroad, its health care system has continued to run smoothly. Doctors say this is because it has been preparing for a pandemic ever since Sars caught it by surprise. During the Sars outbreak, health care workers accounted for 41 per cent of Singapore’s 238 infections.
Consequently its hospitals swung into contingency planning mode early on in the coronavirus outbreak, telling staff to defer leave and travel plans after its first cases emerged.
Meanwhile, its hospitals swiftly split their workforces into teams to ensure there were enough workers if the outbreak worsened, and to ensure workers got enough rest.

Singapore has 13,766 doctors, or 2.4 doctors for every 1,000 people. That compares to 2.59 in the US, 1.78 in China and 4.2 in Germany. Places like Myanmar and Thailand have fewer than one doctor for every 1,000 people.

Coronavirus: Covid-19 could live on in Indonesia long after world recovers

22 Mar 2020

“The objective is that you can run essential services with the greatest amount of security. Make sure functional units have redundancy built in, and are separate from each other. It depends on what you feel is sufficient to carry on services if one team is affected, factoring in rest periods and some system of rotation,” said Chia Shi-Lu, an orthopaedic surgeon.

The key is to ensure a good doctor-to-patient ratio and ensure there are enough specialists for the critical work, such as doctors and nurses who can provide intensive care, and know how to operate mechanical ventilators or machines to pump and oxygenate a patient’s blood outside the body.

At the emergency department where paediatrics emergency specialist Jade Kua treats Covid-19 cases in addition to regular emergencies, doctors are split into four teams of 21. Each team takes alternate 12-hour shifts and does not interact with other teams.

“We are in modular teams so the teams move together. So you and I would both do morning, off, night, off, morning off. Together. And then the other teams would do the same and we don’t intermingle,” said Kua.

US now has world’s most coronavirus cases, surpassing China
Chia, who works at the Singapore General Hospital, said doctors had been split up according to their functions.
“We try not to meet at all with the other teams as much as possible. We’ll just say hi from across the corridor. Meals are the same. All our cafeterias and everything have got social distancing spaced in already,” said Chia, who is also a member of parliament and chairs a shadow committee on health.
Chia said the health care system could also tap on doctors in the private sector.
Not every country has a plan like this. Last year’s Global Health Security Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that 70 per cent of 195 countries scored poorly when it came to having a national plan for dealing with epidemics or pandemics. Almost three in 10 had failed to identify which areas were insufficiently staffed. In India, with a population of 1.3 billion, only about 20,000 doctors are trained in key areas such as critical care, emergency medicine and pulmonology.
Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan: the real coronavirus world leaders
19 Mar 2020

In contrast, Singapore published its first Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response Plan in June 2005 and has since honed it to a tee. Hospitals regularly war-game scenarios such as pandemics or terrorist attacks and the simulations are sometimes observed by the Ministry of Health, which grades the performance and recommends areas for improvement.

The plan also covers the need to stockpile equipment to avoid the sort of shortages many countries are now facing, another lesson inspired by Sars when masks, gloves and gowns were in short supply.

In a pandemic preparation paper published in 2008, Singapore public health specialist Jeffery Cutter wrote that Singapore’s stockpile was sufficient to cover at least 5 to 6 months’ use by all front-line health care workers.

During the Covid-19 outbreak, it has also told citizens to not wear masks so it can conserve supply for medical staff.

Having enough protective gear has reassured Singapore’s health care workers such as Kua, a mother of six who blogged about her experience fighting Covid-19. Kua said: “I’m safe and my family is safe.”

India’s poor hit hard by 21-day nationwide lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic
SOMETHING YOU CAN’T GUARD AGAINST
Despite the many positives to emerge from the Lion City, its health care workers are struggling with another problem: discrimination.
While in France, Italy and Britain, residents cheer health care workers from their windows, in Singapore health care workers are seen by some people as disease carriers.
“I try not to wear my uniform home because you never know what kind of incidents you may encounter,” said one Singapore nurse. “The public is scared and wearing our uniforms actually causes quite a bit of inconvenience. One of my staff tried to book a private-hire car to the hospital for an emergency and she was rejected by five drivers.”

There is a similar stigma in India, where the All India Institute of Medical Sciences has appealed to the government for help after health workers were forced out of their homes by panicked landlords and housing societies.

“Many doctors are stranded on the roads with all their luggage, nowhere to go, across the country,” the institute said in a letter.

Lim, from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, said the worst human impulses and “every man for himself” attitudes could emerge in crises and “that is exactly why governments have to step in”.

Discrimination could affect both the performance and motivation of health care workers, Lim warned.

Meanwhile, when health care workers are infected, it creates a “triple whammy” threat.

“It means one fewer professional in an already-strained system, another patient to care for and, potentially, a team of colleagues who need to be quarantined,” said Lim.

“We must do everything possible to keep our health care workforce safe and free from Covid-19.”

Source: SCMP

27/03/2020

U.S. has most coronavirus cases in world, next wave aimed at Louisiana

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The number of U.S. coronavirus infections climbed above 82,000 on Thursday, surpassing the national tallies of China and Italy, as New York, New Orleans and other hot spots faced a surge in hospitalizations and looming shortages of supplies, staff and sick beds.

With medical facilities running low on ventilators and protective masks and hampered by limited diagnostic testing capacity, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, rose beyond 1,200.

“Any scenario that is realistic will overwhelm the capacity of the healthcare system,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told a news conference. He described the state’s projected shortfall in ventilators – machines that support the respiration of people have cannot breathe on their own – as “astronomical.”

“It’s not like they have them sitting in the warehouse,” Cuomo added. “There is no stockpile available.”

At least one New York City hospital, New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan, has begun a trial of sharing single ventilators between two patients.

While New York was the coronavirus epicenter in the United States this week, the next big wave of infections appeared headed for Louisiana, where demand for ventilators has already doubled. In New Orleans, the state’s biggest city, Mardi Gras celebrations late last month are believed to have fueled the outbreak.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said New Orleans would be out of ventilators by April 2 and potentially out of bed space by April 7 “if we don’t flatten the infection curve soon.”

“It’s not conjecture, it’s not some flimsy theory,” Edwards told a press conference. “This is what is going to happen.”

About 80% of Louisiana’s intensive care patients are now on breathing machines, up from the normal rate of 30-40%, said Warner Thomas, chief executive of Ochsner Health System, the state’s hospital group.

Scarcities of protective masks, gloves, gowns and eyewear for doctors and nurses – reports abound of healthcare workers recycling old face masks, making their own or even using trash bags to shield themselves – have emerged as a national problem.

“Our nurses across the country do not have the personal protective equipment that is necessary to care for COVID patients, or any of their patients,” Bonnie Castillo, head of the largest U.S. nurses union, National Nurses United, told MSNBC.

In an ominous milestone for the United States as a whole, at least 82,153 people nationwide were infected as of Thursday, according to a Reuters tally from state and local public health agencies. China, where the global pandemic emerged late last year, had the second highest number of cases, 81,285, followed by Italy with 80,539.

At least 1,204 Americans have died from COVID-19, which has proven especially dangerous to the elderly and people with underlying chronic health conditions, Reuters’ tally showed.

MORE BEDS NEEDED

For New York state, Cuomo said a key goal was rapidly to expand the number of available hospital beds from 53,000 to 140,000.

New York hospitals were racing to comply with Cuomo’s directive to increase capacity by at least 50%. At Mount Sinai Hospital’s Upper East Side location, rooms were being constructed within an atrium to open up more space for beds.

At Elmhurst Hospital in New York’s borough of Queens, about a hundred people, many wearing masks with their hoods pulled up, lined up behind barriers outside the emergency room entrance, waiting to enter a tent to be screened for the coronavirus.

The city coroner’s office has posted refrigerated trucks outside Elmhurst and Bellevue Hospital to temporarily store bodies of the deceased.

Deborah White, vice chair of emergency medicine at Jack D. Weiler Hospital in the city’s Bronx borough, said 80% of its emergency room visits were patients with coronavirus-like symptoms.

A ventilator shortfall and surge in hospitalizations has already raised the prospect of rationing healthcare.

Asked about guidelines being drafted on how to allocate ventilators to patients in case of a shortage, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy told reporters such bioethical discussions “haunted him” but were unavoidable.

Outside New York and New Orleans, other hot spots appeared to be emerging around the country, including Detroit.

Brandon Allen, 48, was buying groceries in Detroit for his 72-year-old mother, who has tested positive and was self-quarantining at home.

“It’s surreal,” Allen said. “People around me I know are dying. I know of a couple people who have died. I know a couple of people who are fighting for their lives. Everyday you hear of another person who has it.”

RECORD UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS

Desperate to slow virus transmissions by limiting physical contact among people, state and local governments have issued stay-at-home orders covering about half the U.S. population. A major side effect has been the strangulation of the economy, and a wave of layoffs.

The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday the number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits last week soared to a record of nearly 3.28 million – almost five times the previous weekly peak of 695,000 during the 1982 recession.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said warmer weather may help tamp down the U.S. outbreak as summer approaches, though the virus could re-emerge in the winter.

“We hope we get a respite as we get into April, May and June,” Fauci said on WNYC public radio.

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee said he may extend a stay-at-home order tentatively set to expire April 6, encouraged by what he called a “very modest improvement” in the Seattle area.

Washington experienced the first major U.S. outbreak of COVID-19 and has been among the hardest-hit states. As of Thursday the state reported about 3,200 cases and 147 deaths.

In California’s Coachella Valley, a region rife with retirees who are especially vulnerable, 25 members of the state’s National Guard helped a non-profit distribute food to people stuck in their homes, as most of the regular volunteers are senior citizens.

More than 10,000 troops have been deployed in 50 states to provide humanitarian aid during the pandemic.

Source: Reuters

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