Emergency rooms across the country are preparing for a crush of cases, but with limited capacity and supplies, administrators fear they will not be ready.
Yes.
Emergency rooms.
Not the system as whole. Not the supply chain of medical devices. Not the treatment chain.
Emergency rooms.
And, having had to deal with Emergency Rooms, I can tell you, it gets nuts when people decide en masse to swamp them.
And yes, you can't logistically deal with it.
That doesn't mean we can't deal with the issue at large. It merely means if every person who thinks they have the disease shows up to an emergency room (please do not do that), it could overwhelm the system at large.
Why? Because emergency rooms are easy to overwhelm.
My experience was AMEDD, where we had three general categories.
1) Emergency (because it was field medicine, true emergency)
2) Vet and Retired (very common routine stuff)
3) Recoup (which is people who needed long term care)
You aren't gonna die tomorrow. Not everything is an emergency.
PLEASE DO NOT GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM.
Look for a local Urgent Care or GP. Yeah, it may not be YOUR GP, but look for that.
I can tell you, as a family physician, who works for a large independent physician group, we do not have enough supplies. Our N95 masks are under lock and key at my site as is the rest of our PPE equipment to prevent them from “walking off.” We were informed use one squirt per bottle on our liquid hand sanitizer because what we have in the building is what we will have for the time being. That too is on backorder.
Everything is back ordered and the two major hospital systems with their own outpatient clinics in town (my metro area is between 300-450K depending on how you count it) also do not have enough supplies.
How do I know this? Because our three major groups are coordinating and everyone is coming up short. This isn’t just an emergency room thing. There are simply limited resources and until/when production ramps up on the PPE equipment, there is not enough. And if there isn’t enough here, there isn’t enough most everywhere.
Everything is being used very judiciously because we know we have limited supplies. And those supply chains you speak of...You think we’re just going to magically get more when we run out?
There is panic and hysteria for certain, and it’s not helping things. Just cause you have a cough does not mean it’s Coronavirus. But if you think that if people stay away from the ERs and go to their GP, of which I am one, it’s just gonna be all ok cause of course *we* have enough equipment, you’re fooling yourself.
(PS I’m also a sub for our group’s urgent care. They screened 300+ people yesterday virtually to determine who might actually need testing for Covid. The wait was 3+ hours. So telling people “oh just go to urgent care” isn’t as simple as you think.)
I’ve been appalled by some of your rather dismissive comments. As I said, the panic is not helping but neither are people like you, taking a completely blase’ attitude based on your apparent experiences in medicine 20 years ago. It’s changed a bit since then.
I’ve said my piece. Now I’m going to go take care of my patients.