COVID

COVID

So facts about COVID from someone who was (eventually) on the front lines. You can read my reports on things to your heart’s content by clicking here. It’s a chronicle of COVID as we lived it.

When COVID first came around, I was still teaching high school, but my son was working in the emergency room in Harlem. The things he reported to me and saw with his own eyes were incredible. COVID was certainly killing people, and it was doing it wholesale.

The hospital ships sent to New York went largely unused. Not because there were no sick people to be had, but because of the requirements. Patients had to be sent there with a 30 day supply of whatever medications they required. They couldn’t have an active COVID infection, and those are just the two I remember. I know there were more, but that’s what I have after 6 years.

The stories he told had me convinced it was real. It’s what pushed me to come out of my semi-retired life to go back to medicine. I spent the first eight months of my return working on the COVID wing for some of my shifts. The hospital had a COVID wing because all elective procedures had been cancelled, and they were using the floor for that for COVID patients. The things I saw convinced me that COVID was real. I am also convinced it was an engineered bio weapon.

COVID was a real pandemic, hospitals were being overrun, and that is just how it was. So why were there videos of nurses dancing? Nurses have specialties, and it takes years to retrain a nurse in a different specialty. If you look closely at the areas where the dancing videos were taking place, they look like PACU to me (Post Anesthesia Care Unit). That is an area where nurses care for patients after surgery. Since all elective procedures were canceled, the majority of surgical nurses had nothing to do.

So many people were hospitalized for it because there was a financial incentive. Hospitals were paid extra for COVID patients, so they tested everyone for it. If you broke your leg and had to be hospitalized, you got a COVID test. If it was positive, that Dx got added to your chart, and the hospital made more money.

Ivermectin doesn’t seem to really help. I tried it. No other treatments really work, either. It’s a virus, and most viruses have to simply run their course. The vaccine doesn’t do anything. I took two doses of the Moderna vaccine and still got COVID three times. Still, as infectious diseases do, they kill in their early form, then become deadly as the generations go on. That’s just how viruses work. It just amazes me that it became less deadly so quickly.

Infections kill. That’s a fact of life, and it’s your immune system that decides whether or not you die. It’s either up to the task or it isn’t. Especially with viruses.

Do I believe the US had a hand in creating the virus? I do. Do I think Fauci was part of it? I do.

By Divemedic, ago

COVID Gaslighting

We live in a high trust society. If someone tells you the lettuce is safe to eat, we have to trust that it is. If someone tells you this particular treatment will fix the clog in your heart’s blood vessels, you have to trust that it will. After all, no one has the resources to independently verify every statement made by another. I trust people all day- I trust that the medicine in the vial marked “Toradol” isn’t actually “Rocuronium” and my patient trusts that I know what I am doing when I give it to them.

That’s why I get so angry at the left’s current whitewashing of Fauci’s behavior during the pandemic, and their gaslighting of what actually happened. The left is busy claiming Fauci never said the lack of symptoms wasn’t an indicator of having COVID, and that he never said getting the vaccine would prevent you from getting COVID. We have receipts. Here is Fauci saying (sorry video won’t embed):

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.

Then here is FAuci in the spring of 2021 saying that you likely won’t get COVID if you’ve been vaccinated (except limited breakthrough cases):

When people get vaccinated, they can feel safe, no matter what circumstance they are under.- Dr Fauci

Now every one of us remembers that narrative changing to “the vaccine makes COVID less severe” and “you are less likely to be hospitalized” if you get the vaccine.

The left is busy protecting the US Doctor Mengele- except this guy is responsible for enough deaths to make Mengele look like an amateur.

The left is busy screaming about NYC wanting to place Netanyahu under arrest for the deaths of 73,000 people in Gaza. We can’t touch Fauci, thanks to Biden’s pardon. I have an idea- let’s go to the International Criminal Court, and turn over every bit of evidence we have to the Hague, and let THEM prosecute him, since no American who lost a loved one has seen fit to mete out some frontier justice themselves.

All of this nonsense is destroying our high trust society. No one believes anything that anyone else has to say. Let’s end it now.

By Divemedic, ago

Liability Shield

Just as many so-called “conspiracy theorists” have been telling us, at least one government has admitted that it has been withholding data that may link the COVID jab to excess deaths. Of course, this news is nowhere near new. We knew they were hiding data at least three years ago:

So-called “scientists” who receive all of their funding from the government called those who made these claims “disinformants” and called this opinion “misinformation.” Study after study was published about the dissemination of false narratives concerning the COVID vaccine. Every one of those studies was based upon the “fact” that COVID vaccines were safe and effective.

We were lied to.

Those who released information that COVID itself was manmade or that the vaccine was ineffective were summarily deplatformed, fired, and otherwise had their lives destroyed. There is nothing so evil that our government won’t do it.

By Divemedic, ago

Report From the ED

Working in the Emergency Department, it’s odd that each day tends to have a theme- that is, the patients who come in tend to follow a pattern of similar complaints. Some days, it is STI’s, other days, it’s heart problems. The theme of the last few days in the hospital has been mental health and substance abuse.

The last day that I worked, there was a man that was found naked, lying in the street. He couldn’t even tell us his name. His drug and alcohol screens were all negative. There was the woman we Baker Acted, because she was working with the FBI on a child trafficking case, and some one had given her a delayed reaction drug six years ago, and now they had activated it remotely to silence her. Then there was the guy who came in with a blood alcohol level of 486.

There was a guy that came in with a knife. He looked like butterbean: Bald, 340 pounds, 6 foot 4 inches tall. He looked at you like he was trying decide how he was going to kill you. His first words to the triage nurse were, “Which one of you nurses think you can take this from me?” Two security guards and a rather large doctor tackled him. He got Ketamine and Versed to no effect. So then we held him down and gave him another 200 mg of Ketamine, followed by a dose of Rocuronium. After the intubation, he still required the maximum dose for 3 different sedatives to keep him down. Since sedatives lower the patient’s blood pressure, he also required Levophed.

Flu season is over- I haven’t seen a patient test positive for Flu in weeks. COVID seems to be having a bit of a surge. In the past two weeks, I have seen perhaps half a dozen patients who were positive for COVID. Symptoms are vague, but mild. Patients complain of stomach pain, sore throat, congestion, body aches, and other assorted mild complaints. Only one of them was running a fever. We tell them to drink fluids, take Tylenol or Motrin, and get lots of rest.

We are running far busier this summer than usual, averaging 300 patients or so per day. This is our slow season, when we typically see 200 or so per day. During the busier Flu and snow bird season, we usually have about 450 to 500 per day. Overall, we usually serve 140,000-170,000 patients per year. This year will likely surpass that.

By Divemedic, ago

Evil

The FBI knew in 2021 that the COVID virus was bioengineered and didn’t tell President Biden. Of course they knew- I posted back in 2022 that the Federal government knew the virus was engineered using a segment of genetic material that was patented by Moderna back in 2016. The artificial genetic sequence is what gives this virus the particular affinity for human lung tissue that it has. The evidence is obvious- the virus is a bioweapon that was either accidentally or intentionally released into the wild. There can be no other explanation.

Since we also know that Fauci and our own government was funding this research, we can also conclude that our own government killed millions of people. Whether this was caused intentionally, or through large scale incompetence remains unclear, but in either case, it is painfully obvious that our government handles power in much the same way as a couple of four year old children who are playing in their father’s gun cabinet.

By Divemedic, ago

Free Canadian Healthcare, Suicide, and COVID

We always hear from the left that “all of the other industrialized nations have free healthcare. You shouldn’t have to go bankrupt in order to be healthy.”

Too bad that’s all bullshit. Healthcare is a service that is provided by people who are, for the most part, skilled at what they do. To demand that they provide it for free is not possible, even if slavery were to make a reappearance. In the event of slavery, you can compel physical labor, but there is no way to demand intellectual labor. That is, you can make someone go to work as a doctor, but you can’t make them be good at it.

For that reason, healthcare can either be free, or it can be good. Purchasing quality requires money. (edited to add) In this case, those who advocate for ‘free’ healthcare really are saying that they want the rest of the people in the country to pay for their care. This is little different than the system of insurance that we have now, except that the system will be compulsory through taxation and the government will decide who gets care, instead of an insurance company deciding. (end edit) The higher the quality, the more the cost. Even then, the number of people who can and will make good doctors, nurses, and other health professionals is a finite pool. For that reason, healthcare is a limited resource.

It’s a resource that must be rationed somehow. After all, if there is a finite commodity like healthcare, there cannot be free healthcare to everyone to receive all of it that they wish, with either cost or simple capacity of facilities being the controlling factor. If I have to explain that to my readers, let’s just say that I would be extremely disappointed. Here in the United States, we ration healthcare by cost- people can only have the care that they can afford. In Canada, it used to be rationed by government quota. That system was breaking down; I know one man with dual citizenship who waited for over two years to receive a knee replacement before giving up and moving back to the US, getting the surgery less than 3 months later.

Canada has a problem with spending too many resources on the sick and elderly. Taking a page from Logan’s Run, they have decided to encourage the sick to simply kill themselves. It’s an effective way to control costs- take those who are costing you the most and simply kill them. In fact, more Canadians have died from government assisted suicide since the program began than have died from COVID. Beginning in 2027, that program will be expanded to include those with mental illness.

It’s hard to see that this is an idea that we as Americans would or should accept, but I find it odd that the left supports the same idea that began the Holocaust while at the same time calling those of us who are to the right of Joseph Stalin “literally Hitler.” If we were to expand that to include mental illness, millions of Americans would likely choose to end their lives.

That free healthcare comes at a cost. But hey, as long as you can use the money you used to spend on care to get yourself a new BMW, who cares if a few eggs have to be broken, amirite?

By Divemedic, ago

Ventilation

The lungs are the organ that allows oxygen to enter the body and carbon dioxide to leave the body. They accomplish this by permitting gas to enter small sacs called alveoli. These sacs allow the exchange of gas across their membrane. The alveoli stay open through the use of a surfactant. In an infection, it can travel to the lungs and cause a potentially fatal condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In ARDS, the alveoli fill with a fluid that is essentially pus, which diminishes the lungs’ ability to provide vital organs with enough oxygen. There are ways that we can fight that.

If the patient is conscious and able to keep their own airway open, we can put them on CPAP or BiPAP, which is a mask that pressurizes the air that the person is breathing. This extra pressure forces the fluid out of the alveoli and back into the bloodstream. If a person can’t maintain their own airway, they will be intubated and placed on a ventilator. That ventilator will provide pressurized oxygen, and this is called PEEP. You can see it at work here, where a mechanical ventilator is working on a set of pig lungs as a demonstration:

As doctors have gained more experience treating patients with COVID-19, they’ve found that many can avoid ventilation—or do better while on ventilators—when they are turned over to lie on their stomachs. This is called prone positioning, or proning. Because of how the lungs are positioned, this lets you use parts of your lungs that aren’t being used when you are on your back, because it reduces pressure from the heart and diaphragm on the lungs, which allows them to inflate more easily.

If we are talking about emergency intubations (IOW not for procedural reasons), the only people who get intubated and placed on a vent are really sick. People colloquially refer to this as “being on life support.” Anyone can tell you that a person who isn’t adequately breathing on their own is pretty sick. So, for starters, anyone who is being intubated is a pretty sick puppy.

The most common complications in COVID-19 infections are bilateral pneumonia which may progressed to ARDS, sepsis and septic shock, acute kidney injury and others such as acute cardiac injury, coagulopathy, hyponatremia (low sodium levels in the blood) and acidosis (blood Ph too low). Complications are more likely in serious sickness versus non-extreme illness.

On top of that, there are risks for mechanical ventilation: overinflating the lungs, oxygen toxicity, and other issues are possible complications. These complications are more likely in people with ARDS, diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic heart or lung disease, and obesity all are at higher risk of complications from mechanical ventilation. You will recall that these same risk factors also make a patient more susceptible to COVID.

If your COVID infection is bad enough that it is collapsing your alveoli, you likely have problems with other organs as well- specifically the liver, heart, and kidneys. Remember- the same cytokine storm that is damaging the lungs is also damaging other organs as well. This can cause the development of something called MODS (multiple organ dysfunction syndrome). What causes about 20% of COVID deaths is MODS, and is not due to the use of a ventilator. Three quarters of the people who developed MODS already had underlying problems like kidney or heart disease, diabetes, or were morbidly obese.

The simple fact is that we in health care are using other methods for treating low blood oxygen caused by COVID, such as high flow devices (up to 60 liters of oxygen per minute) to try and delay or put off the need to mechanically ventilate a patient, but once you are sick enough from COVID to need a ventilator, you are really sick and your likelihood for surviving is low.

By Divemedic, ago

How Do Viral Infections Work?

Every cell in your body contains a mechanism for manufacturing the proteins and other substances that the cell needs to manufacture during its interphase. Review yesterday’s post for an explanation of interphase. Again, for those who know the details, please excuse the fact that I am simplifying a terribly complex system. This is years of schooling condensed down into a blog post. I can’t be comprehensive here.

There are different types of infections, and a virus is but one of them. What is a virus? It’s a segment of genetic material that enters its target cell, takes over that manufacturing center, and instructs that cell to begin manufacturing copies of the virus. The cell will do that until the interior of the cell is filled with copies of the virus, then the cell bursts open and releases them. Since a virus can’t reproduce by itself, it is not technically alive. Since viruses aren’t alive, antibiotics don’t work on viral infections.

When a person gets a viral infection, there are no magic treatments. The way that these infections have been treated is to suppress symptoms and support the patient until their own immune system can rally and defeat the infection. For example, when you get a cold or the flu, we give you Tylenol for fever, cough medicine to suppress a cough, decongestants, etc.

So how does your immune system work to do this? There are two parts to your immune system: the innate, and the adaptive. The innate system is a number of general responses that fight the infection until the adaptive system can analyze the infection, develop a counter to it, and manufacture that counter. Once the adaptive immune system develops a counter to a particular illness, it will remember that, and you won’t get sick from it again (with some exceptions).

All of those symptoms that you get from an infection (fever, congestion, etc) are caused by your immune system creating what’s called inflammation. The inflammatory response (inflammation) occurs when tissues are injured by infections, trauma, toxins, heat, or any other cause. The damaged cells (that broke open when filled by viruses) release chemicals including histamine, bradykinin, chemokines, interferons, interleukins, lymphokines, tumor necrosis factor, and prostaglandins. Many of these chemicals are referred to as cytokines. When released, they signal the immune system to do its job.

Cytokines are responsible for all sorts of things- runny nose, mucous in the airway, fever, cough, fatigue, all of the symptoms we normally associate with symptoms of being sick. Some infections, and COVID is among them, cause too many cytokines to be released in some people, and the result is caused a cytokine storm. A cytokine storm causes an extreme overreaction of the body to the infection. The immune system actually begins to attack the patient’s own body. This appears to happen to as many as 15% of the patients infected by the original version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. In some of these patients, and no one yet knows why, the cytokine storm is enough to cause a deadly pneumonia. The only thing that IS known is that having certain preexisting conditions that are already creating inflammation increases the risk of this happening. Things that create inflammation are numerous and varied: diabetes, obesity, asthma, smoking, etc. That’s why there are so many risk factors for COVID being serious.

In these patients, it is cytokines called Interleukins, such as interleukin-6 (1L-6), interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-17 (IL-17), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) that play a significant role in lung damage in ARDS patients through attacking the tissues of the lungs. A pneumonia develops which requires hospitalization.

Normally, if a patient’s immune system is attacking them, we just give them antihistamines and steroids, which combine to shut down the immune system. That’s what we do to asthmatics, for example. We can’t do that in the presence of an infection, because the immune system is what we are expecting to fight the infection and shutting it down would be a bad idea.

When a patient comes into the emergency room with a suspected infection, there are things that we look for that indicate that the patient has too much inflammation going on. They are called SIRS criteria. (Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome). When a patient meets those criteria, there are a set of orders that the nurse implements without consulting the doctor. IV Fluids, chest Xray, drawing blood cultures and other labs, etc. Testing for a host of respiratory viruses is done (Influenza, RSV, COVID, and others). Urine is tested for signs of a UTI. We then give Ofirmev (IV Tylenol) and oxygen as needed. We also give precautionary antibiotics. All of this must be done within 90 minutes of the patient arriving at the ED door, per hospital policy. I average about 55 minutes for getting it all done if I am uninterrupted. It’s a lot of work.

If the patient comes back positive for COVID, they are usually sent home with instructions to return if the symptoms get worse, but if they are one of the unlucky ones who have ARDS, they get admitted. This means that about 90% or so of our COVID patients are discharged home.

The ones who do get admitted are usually fairly sick. I wasn’t here during the early days of COVID in 2020, but I did work in the COVID units in 2021. Many of them were in septic shock, had coagulopathies, and were in pretty bad shape. About one in ten of the patients admitted for COVID died. I really do think that the disease is less lethal than it once was, because in the past two years I can count on the fingers of one hand the patients I have seen die from COVID, with at least two of them having cancer and one of them refusing all treatment because he didn’t believe that COVID was real. Right up until he died, he insisted that we were making it up and purposely making him sick so we could make more money. Just two weeks ago, I had a patient telling me that COVID wasn’t real, and it was all a conspiracy that the doctors were using to make more money. I told him, “OK, well, you have COVID and we are discharging you home. If you feel worse, come back in. Other than that, drink lots of fluids and get some rest. Here are your discharge papers. I hope you get better soon.”

To be honest, that’s all you can say to people who won’t listen to reason.

As a related note, I want to take a minute to describe and explain Remdesivir.

I already said that viral replication uses the cell’s own manufacturing system to make copies of the virus. The virus in this case is a segment of RNA. How Remdesivir works is that it terminates the RNA transcription that SARS-CoV-2 requires in order to replicate itself.

In late August of 2020, patients who received Remdesivir made a high number of reports of liver and kidney problems. This was due to the government not testing this drug in clinical trials, upending decades of precedent in approving medications. For that reason, many hospitals required patients to sign a statement of informed consent following a full disclosure of the risks and benefits of receiving Remdesivir. At least at my hospital, all patients who received the drug after October of 2020 or so had to sign this consent form.

Now you know.

By Divemedic, ago

Government Screws Things Up

When government gets involved in anything, they screw it up. Maybe on purpose, maybe not.

Do you run around and scream that gun stores can’t be trusted? Or do you place the blame where it lies: with that individual, or with the government that made the law that caused the policy? Do you recognize that it is unfair to ask someone to forgo their livelihood so you can circumvent a law with which you disagree?

Do you then blame the pharmacist for not giving you drugs without a prescription?

There are plenty of laws with which I disagree. Some of them even dictate my behavior at work. We all have that happen. A friend who works at the county health department recently had a guy throw used needles at her because she wouldn’t accept them for disposal unless they were in an approved Sharps container. (Even though I happen to agree with that law)

When I was a paramedic and posted on a now defunct gun board, I was accused of being a “jackbooted thug” because I disarmed a patient who had sustained a head injury in a motorcycle accident and was carrying a pistol. I transported him to the hospital with his gun in his backpack, which I put in the cab of the ambulance. Why? Because people with head injuries aren’t in their right mind, and will often get violent because of the “fight or flight” response. It was for everyone’s safety. If I had gotten the cops to take that gun, he likely wouldn’t have seen it again. Believe it or not, I did the guy a favor.

The same accusation was made against me when I said that we occasionally take people to the hospital against their will, for example people who are threatening suicide or who have had a head injury or stroke. Why? The law says that they aren’t in their right mind and don’t have the capacity to make informed decisions. I did a post on that back in 2010. I am a firm believer in patients making their own decisions after being presented with the facts. The only thing that we truly own is our bodies, and we have every right to control them. However, a person who is not able to make an informed decision still has a moral right to receive care.

So why do I bring that up? Because the job that I work in is FAR more regulated than the firearms industry. I don’t make the rules, and neither does anyone else in the hospital. We are dictated to by a lot of agencies: CMS, AHCA, the Joint Commission, state nursing board, DOH, tons of agencies. They run everything from what medications we give to how much we can charge for what we do. If you don’t follow the rules, you lose your license and can be barred from ever working in this field again.

So I disagree when people blame the medical field for what happened in 2020 with COVID. The lockdowns, the vax mandates, all of that nonsense came from the government. Don’t think I am just defending myself and my actions here, because if you will recall, I didn’t return to the health care profession until 2021.

The TikTok dance videos? They were stupid and damaging to the reputation of the medical field, but when you understand that the videos were coming from the outpatient surgery centers that were shut down as a result of COVID mandates, that makes it a bit less shocking. Then consider that surgical nurses aren’t the same as ED or ICU nurses. It takes a year at minimum to train an RN to a basic level of competency in emergency medicine, and that’s a year after licensure, on top of nursing school. It’s a complicated subject that takes years to master. So those nurses who weren’t in fields like the ED, ICU, or ECMO were left with nothing to do and made stupid videos. Still not a damning indictment of all medical professionals.

No, what the people who comment on here about how COVID was the fault of doctors and nurses don’t seem to grasp, is that the lockdowns, the mandates, all of that were the fault of government wannabe dictators getting their tyranny on.

Crying about the way COVID was treated shows a complete lack of understanding of respiratory illness and its treatment. Health professionals were doing what had always worked for respiratory illnesses in the past.

Those treatments worked until COVID came along. Scientists have found that a section of the genetic material that makes up the COVID virus genetic sequence was patented by Moderna for cancer research purposes in February of 2016. The sequence is 19 base pairs long, meaning that there is only a one in three trillion chance that the virus happened naturally. It just so happens that this engineered sequence gave the virus a special affinity for human lung tissue. That makes COVID fall firmly into the category of a biological warfare agent.

Then the shutdown and the turmoil that followed was an engineered crisis that in my opinion was designed to put Joe Biden in the Whitehouse. I have posted on that as well.

So don’t come on here and disparage what the medical professionals did for the COVID outbreak. It isn’t them that caused the problems- it was the people that YOU elected and put in charge. Government receives power with the consent of the governed. What have you done to change what is happening?

Have a problem with it? Get the law changed. You say that you can’t? What makes you think that I can?

By Divemedic, ago