Imagine a 50-year-old woman with uncontrolled diabetes who enters the emergency room with a cough, fever and breathing difficulties; two minutes later, a healthy 75-year-old woman enters the same emergency room with the same symptoms. he wants a fan to stay alive, with pus and fluid filling his lungs, but there’s only one left in town. Is he the oldest and healthiest patient or the youngest and sickest?
As a number one care physician in California, we have almost reached this turning point by fighting the new coronavirus. Staff shortages were increasing, so we assembled a Department of Defense army team of two dozen doctors and nurses to provide protection to our largest hospitals. los Angeles: Harbor-UCLA and USC-LAC. At one point, we had fewer than a hundred beds of extensive care for busy and unemployed adults for the largest county in the United States, about 10 million people. We weren’t alone. Houston, america’s fourth-largest city, nearly ran out of beds for extensive care, while Montgomery, the largest city of the time in Alabama, ran out of beds for extensive care.
Now get into the flu. At most doctors will tell you, hospitals are reaching their peak every year during the flu season. I know because I’m one of the doctors, what would have happened if flu season had taken a position?This summer’s COVID outbreak?
As scientists around the world compete for a vaccine, there’s a way to defeat COVID-19: it’s called a flu vaccine. And this is our most productive possibility as opposed to the “worst fall” nightmare in the history of public fitness, as noted through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It is the highest flu vaccine of the century.
Last week, the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine was temporarily discontinued after an unexplained illness from a volunteer. However, for the vaccine we have, less than the part of American adults are vaccinated for both one year. To make matters worse, the capacity of hospital beds in the United States has decreased by almost 40% in the last 40 years, leaving us with 300,000 beds for one or both days. Does that sound like a lot? Last year, there were about 500,000 influenza hospitalizations.
There is a climax in the Titanic film where the captain asks the lead engineer if the shipment will sink after colliding with an iceberg and the leading engineer realizes that if seawater is contained in the first 4 cabins at the bottom, the ship can cross the Atlantic. However, if the fifth cabin floods, it is a “mathematical certainty” that the Titanic will sink. This is the turning point, where the death toll increases exponentially – maximum shipments will die. The fifth cabin filled up.
The American fitness care formula also has a turning point. It is a finite formula, with an explained number of beds, fans, nurses and doctors. We saw on television with surprise and horror the distressed Italian doctors whom he lives and who dies.
Consider this: Italy has more beds in proportion to the population than the United States.
Are we next? What if your grandmother, 75, and your mother, 50, who would you choose for your last respirator?
However, this need not be the case; it is within our forces to replace the course of history: if we advanced influenza vaccination rates by just 5%, the CDC estimates that we would avoid approximately 483,000 influenza infections. an additional 5% is the maximum measurable effect we can have on COVID right now, as it maintains enough very important resources for fundamental medical needs, which really save life to the fullest: a bed with oxygen for any hospitalized patient, a fan for anyone suffering from respiratory distress, important steroids for $1. 10 tablet and doctors and nurses , equipped with N95 masks of 50 cents, attentive to any replacement in the patient’s condition.
As one of these valuable resources becomes scarcer, it is possible that deaths will become unworkable. More than 190,000 have already died. Social esttachment, masking and collective immunity can help COVID, but why run more dangers when the only certainty is uncertainty?
One thing we can cause in this global pandemic right now is our body’s ability to fight the flu. This fall, coVID’s most productive intervention for us is the flu vaccine. It helps prevent our fifth cabin from filling up and destroying the entire U. S. health care system.
Dr. Atul Nakhasi is a physician at LA Surge Hospital and a policy advisor to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the nation’s largest public fitness system.
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