The Infection That’s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients
21st April 2020
Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.
And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?
We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.
Steve Sailer: Buy a Pulse Oximeter
In the NYT, an expert on intubation explains the new view among New York emergency room doctors on what is killing so many people: silent hypoxia. Those with pneumonia caused by the coronavirus don’t have enough oxygen in their blood, but they aren’t short of breath until they’ve had pneumonia for several days, so they don’t go to the emergency room until they’ve already suffered severe lung damage.
But if you get to the hospital when pneumonia first sets in, they can probably get you through it without a ventilator.
Fortunately, there’s a simple and reasonably cheap device you can buy right now to detect if you are running out of oxygen and get treatment when treatment can do the most good.