Sailer In Takimag: The Good News And Bad News From The West Coast
04/15/2020
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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

The good news is that we actually have flattened the curve. Even in New York City, few hospitals are overwhelmed, and in much of the country, such as California, the situation is better than epidemiologists were predicting only a month ago. For example, in Los Angeles County, home to 10 million people:

Roughly 1,059 people in L.A. County are hospitalized for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Of those, 18% are in intensive care and 15% of those patients are on ventilators.

About 0.0016 percent of the residents of L.A. County are on ventilators: not a huge number for an immense urban area that holds 3 percent of the country’s population. In general, California hospitals are rather empty at the moment. …

Unfortunately, one of the reasons that we don’t have as much of a ventilator shortage as was expected is because ventilators aren’t working very well. The success rate of patients getting better on ventilators is depressingly low. This awareness has, in turn, relieved pressure on ICUs and hospitals in general.

Read the whole thing there.

Here’s a new NYT article on how NYC doctors are much more reluctant to intubate than they were a month ago. Instead, they first try having patients with low levels of oxygen in their blood lie face down or on a side with an oxygen mask. (This is my vague impression of Boris Johnson’s treatment.) That often works, and it’s vastly less work for the hospital staff than monitoring a patient on a ventilator.

It’s not clear if hospitals have managed to find a better treatment for acutely ill patients, but they have managed to figure out a better treatment for not overwhelming hospitals, which is a very good thing.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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