This thread is for anything related to the Novel Coronavirus.
'Letter' of a French doctor (translated with _
DeepL.com/Translator)
As a doctor requisitioned to help get through this epidemic crisis, I would like to share with you what is happening in the hospitals, all responding to the orders of the republic.
First of all, you should know that all public and private hospitals in the territory are empty. In this great war waged against the coronavirus, all other pathologies are relegated to second or even third place.
What this means is that all scheduled hospitalizations and scheduled surgeries of people who really need care are cancelled. People who are told to stay home to avoid catching a cold end up dying at home from heart failure, for example, for which they will not have had the necessary care within a given period of time.
For it should be known that this generalized panic having pushed to the confinement, with an aim of stopping the propagation of a virus "which is already there" makes that the totality of the liberal doctors, as well generalists as specialists, close their cabinet. Patients therefore no longer see a doctor, and no one can therefore assess a possible deterioration in their chronic pathology and thus refer them to a hospital service.
It has therefore been more than 2 weeks in occupied France that almost all doctors and surgeons have been technically unemployed. At present, none of us understand what is happening. We all ask ourselves: "Where have these patients who fill our services all year round gone?
Patients experiencing unusual symptoms are therefore instructed to call 15 first so that they can be told what to do: "stay home" or "go to the emergency room".
Here's an example to show you the absurdity of this instruction:
A patient with a slight chest pain in the right base with a slight cough and a slight fever, the 15 Centre will tell him that these are common signs of Covid-19 infection and that he should stay home, it will pass in a few days. Bad luck, it's actually a pulmonary embolism and the patient could go into hypovolemic shock at any time, in addition to necrosis of the lungs. We don't make diagnoses over the phone. Except at this time, obviously.
Now let's talk about the only hospital departments that continue to operate at full capacity:
The E.R. is used to screen patients with the most suspected Covid infection, or patients who may have a real life-threatening emergency that needs to be managed very quickly, as usual.
It should be noted that a Covid+ patient who is considered a "frail individual" (i.e. under 70 years of age with a significant history, or over 70 years of age) will be admitted to the Covid units.
I was requisitioned a while ago to work in one of these Units. What do they look like?
The completely empty hospital wards I told you about are requisitioned to store Covid+ patients.
Before being transferred from the Emergency Department to these Units, these patients are labelled:
Either they are under 70 years old and are labelled as "resuscitatable" (if they deteriorate, we will do everything we can to try to save them), or they are over 70 years old and are labelled LATA which means Limitation and Cessation of Active Therapeutics.
I will try to explain briefly what we do for a resuscitatable patient, and what we do for a LATA patient in this kind of situation. I remind you that the clinical picture of a severe "coronavirus" infection corresponds to pneumonia, an infection of the lungs that attacks the pulmonary alveoli. The terminal phase of this type of infection generally corresponds to what is known as septic shock with a pulmonary starting point: the germ initially present in the lungs and respiratory tract passes into the bloodstream and attacks all the vital organs: heart, brain, liver, kidneys. All of this leads to a coma that makes breathing more difficult, low blood pressure because the heart can no longer function properly, increased toxicity in the body (either because of drugs or because of waste produced by our body all the time) because the liver and kidneys no longer function.
A resuscitated patient in our department: He arrives with pure oxygen to the glasses or mask to help him breathe, we adapt the oxygen flow according to his needs (estimated by the Oxygen Saturation) and in the majority of cases: we do not touch his treatment at all! We add tablet antibiotics in some cases, they are not prescribed at all in a systematic way. The medicines he takes at home, we give them to him, and we do nothing else.
These services, which are presented to us as war zones, totally overwhelmed, are in fact surveillance units where we do almost nothing. I have never had such quiet days as I have had since this crisis began. If one of these patients starts to decompensate, to go into a state of Acute Respiratory Distress with hypotension, pseudocoma, etc. the protocol tells us to intubate, to infuse this patient with 2 to 3L of saline over 3 hours to raise the blood pressure and thus irrigate the vital organs, to give intravenous antibiotics, to give intravenous norepinephrine if the saline filling has not worked as expected. All this is to stabilize vital functions to give the antibiotics time to do their job.
I've been in emergency and resuscitation departments many times, so I know that age is not always the deciding factor when we decide whether or not to resuscitate a patient. I have already seen attempts to resuscitate patients who are 80 years old, because there is a maxim that we like to repeat to give us a clear conscience: We have an obligation of means, but no results. This means that any patient who comes into our hands, we owe it to ourselves to do everything we can to save him or her, even if it turns out to be a bad start from the beginning.
Now let's talk about the LATA patients in the Covid Unit: these are often over 70 years old. Like the young people, they come to our units with Oxygen on their nose, most often with a flow rate of 2 to 3 L/min. If these old patients ever start to require a higher flow of oxygen, 6 to 7 L/min (which can be explained by the fact that these old patients have been carrying their pneumonia for about 7 days most of the time, as they are ordered to stay at home), it is considered that they will not survive their infection. 6 or 7 L/min of oxygen is the limit between life and death in these Units.
Once this stage is reached, the LATA label comes into play. Considering that these old people are going to die anyway (since they will not be resuscitated, cuckoo the obligation of means), we inject them with a cocktail of Morphine and Hypnovel intravenously.
We also use these two molecules in Palliative Care: they induce an artificial coma, a well-known effect, and they also have a respiratory depressive effect. In fact, they have a muscular relaxing effect, particularly on the respiratory muscles (diaphragm, intercostal muscles, pharyngeal muscles, etc.) and therefore lead to drug-induced asphyxia. Doctors, so attached to ethics, call this a "sweet death".
In these units, we therefore artificially kill patients who are condemned as soon as they leave the emergency room. At no time do we seek to do medicine with them. These deaths are then counted as victims of coronavirus, whereas they are in fact the victims of French doctors.
The families of these victims cannot even realize anything. With this confinement, the young patients are not allowed any visits. Patients at the end of life (those who have benefited from the LATA cocktail), are entitled to only one visit per day. The relatives must therefore agree on who will visit the future dead person. And this visitor will not be allowed to visit again during the current week. They therefore have no way to appreciate the clinical evolution of their relative, because we rarely hold more than a week under Morphine and Hypnovel.
So our policies are orchestrating a lot of hospital deaths, and using these deaths to create a general psychosis for a purpose that I cannot yet visualize.
This French Doctor prefers to remain anonymous ... I wonder why?
I'm just commenting on what I see. I seem to have company here. 
