The death rate in April was high because we didn’t understand how to treat Covid. The primary issue is that almost every hospitalized person was being put on a ventilator. But since then, we’ve learned that ventilators were actually iatrogenic and leading to much higher death rates.
Where can I find a source for this? This is new information to me, and searching "covid ventilator" is just bringing up the same studies about how patients who get ventilated have higher mortality, which isn't saying the same thing.
Blood oxygen levels were falling into "should be dead" levels never really seen before (even though they were otherwise alert and fine and had no other hypoxia indicators), which caused doctors to panic about pneumonia and not being able to breathe, and put people on ventilators prematurely. However, it wasn't really having an effect, so the ventilators kept getting turned up to their maximum setting, which puts too much pressure on the lungs and causes additional permanent damage. In most people this caused a turn for the worse instead of recovery.
Just anecdotally, since I am close with a doctor, they stopped rushing to vent and now they treat with Remdesivir and steroids. Looking at the graphs for my state, we have about half the critical care rate at similar or greater detected cases than the spring, so better treatment seems to be a 2xish improvement for hospitalized patients?
They vent at the same point as before, based on breathing. But they were telling people not to come in until they were having difficulty breathing, because they didn't have any early treatment or any space.
Having access to remdesivir/steroids would mean people should come in for treatment early, but it only helps if given very early. But if infection numbers were large enough then we probably wouldn't manage to treat everyone early enough, so it would cut the rate of severe cases by an unknown amount.
Is Remdesivir still in wide use? I know it was given emergency approval in the US, but I thought wider trials were now thought to show a lack of demonstrable results.
