This past Thursday we tubed and lined our first very likely (still no test result) COVID patient at my facility. My colleague garbed up and tubed the guy in his negative pressure room. Because the patient was over 230kg,, I also garbed up and watched from outside the room in case any help was needed. None was.
As of Friday, several other admitted patients were awaiting testing results, all of whom the hospitalists had low suspicion of actually having coronavirus however.
We are hopeful that we won't have as severe an onslaught of sick COVID cases as other regions, mainly due to our low population density, but also because we seem (we hope) to have gotten out ahead of this thing pretty well with the social distancing. Schools closed and people started staying home before there were any known cases in our area. We're on what, week two of that? And still only a pretty small handful of confirmed cases in our catchment area, with most of our surrounding counties having zero known cases. Seems like reassuring trend.
Still, predictions are that that this thing won't peak in our area for a few more weeks, so we'll see. We are as prepared as we can be for whatever comes though the door. Hoping that much more PPE gets delivered before that happens, and also for testing to ramp way up and start turn results around much faster. It is taking 10 days on average for results to come back, which in the case of this thing makes the testing pretty much worthless.
