How do medical workers, such as ER nurses, avoid getting infected by a COVID-19 patient who happens to just walk into the Emergency Room? They’re not wearing full hazmat suits all day and a normal face mask isn’t going to protect them from viruses. What can they do to ensure they aren’t infected by someone with the coronavirus? It’s not like they don’t breathe the same air that these affected people are breathing. Or are they all getting exposed to the virus and nobody is testing them yet for it?
Is there a protocol for that yet? It wouldn’t surprise me if they tested (or home quarantined) any hospital staff that’s at risk for having the virus due to a patient with confirmed positive test.
As for how they don’t get it, the same way they don’t catch everything that walks in the door. Good hygiene practices, good sterilizing techniques and doing their best not to get coughed on.
Now, we’ve got a few hundred confirmed cases, Italy has something like 5000 and China is pushing up against 100,000 confirmed cases.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be taking more precautions now, but I think one of the reasons a lot of people are so lax is because there’s simply not that many cases in the states yet.
I think most people just assume they’re not going to get it out of shear luck…and they’re probably right.
Sometimes they don’t avoid infection.
China has had a lot of medical people die even with taking precautions because they’re around it so much, accidents happen, and it’s an occupational hazard.
It’s like asking how cops avoid getting killed at work since they interact with dangerous criminals on a regular basis. They take precautions, are given special training and equipment, try to learn about situations before going into them, keep tabs on dangerous criminals to be prepared, call for backup at the sign of danger and work with partners. Despite all of that they do get killed on occasion. It’s a dangerous job.
The CDC has posted a preparedness assessment tool for hospitals that includes a process for rapidly identifying and isolating patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19.
It is not perfect protection and some healthcare workers will be infected, but there are precautions being taken.
At my medical association office there’s a sign at the front entrance that says, basically, if you have symptoms of Coronavirus stop, don’t go in. Instead, drive around to the back of the building where they have a screening station set up.
ER nurse here. Many hospitals are setting up separate triage stations for people with sx of the virus. We did similar things for H1N1. However, that isn’t completely effective. Some people have no idea that what they have, is what we are talking about. Elderly and very ill patients brought in by ambulance are also a concern. At some point we start treating everyone as if the are infectious. The Seattle area is doing that I’m sure.
Putting every healthcare worker exposed to the virus on two week self quarantine will quickly shut down the hospitals. We are always exposed. I can imagine some sort of frequent testing, but that is absolutely not happening now.
I have a dental cleaning in a couple weeks. I wonder how dental hygienists are coping.
I’d imagine they’d tell everyone not to come in if they’re showing signs of coronovirus and/or have been around people showing signs of it or if they or someone they’re in close contact with have been on a recent trip to certain areas of the world.
Everyone in close contact with others should be doing that. Even when you go get a haircut, the two of you are breathing all over each other while you’re there. But people in the medical field are probably getting updates directly from the CDC and are paying much closer attention to it than other, non-medical, professions.
A lot of this is similar to federal/local food codes for what food handlers have to do if they’ve contracted specific illnesses, been around people who have specific illnesses or have undiagnosed symptoms similar to those illnesses.
Here’s a form (PDF) that food code requires all food handlers to sign or, at the very least, have explained to them. It explains that you need to report certain things to the employer. From there, the employer has to restrict or exclude you from certain duties until you’re cleared by a doctor. It’s not all that different from what we’re doing with coronavirus.
Isn’t that a big part of the problem? People are walking around with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic. They feel fine, go to the doctor for a routine check-up, and expose everyone in the waiting room and the medical staff who happen to work on them, not to mention their family and friends. If there aren’t routine tests of all medical staff that are exposed to patients I don’t see how they can avoid getting infected. Washing your hands doesn’t stop the airborne virus from entering your lungs. It will be a year before there is a vaccine so we have to do everything we can to contain it. Having medical staff go untested seems needlessly risky. Of course, there aren’t enough test kits to test everyone… BTW, it didn’t take that long to develop and mass-produce test kits, why does it take a year to validate a vaccine?
It has not been established to my knowledge that there is airborne transmission in the medical sense of that term. I don’t think it’s known, but it is suspected that it is primarily spread by droplet transmission. The droplets that spray out up to several feet when a person sneezes or coughs. Airborne transmission tends to refer to much smaller particles that can travel further. It may turn out to be transmitted that way, but it might not. Smaller dry particles or very fine droplets are what is required for it to float around in the air.
The fact that wearing a face mask doesn’t keep you from getting infected (because face masks can’t stop viruses) led me to think it was airborne, and I read you could get it from being 6 feet away from someone. That may be anecdotal, but the fact that it apparently spreads so quickly leads me to believe it’s probably true…
Droplet precautions include airborne droplets. If it is spread via coughing or sneezing, it is airborne.
IT IS AIRBORNE.
Masks are not 100% effective but they are effective.
Just to keep it into perspective, 9.6 million die per year from cancer and 23 million new cases per year.
Coronavirus only 3500 deaths, 100k cases with 92% recovery rate.
Because vaccines have to produce sufficient immune reaction to provide immunity without provoking so much immune response it kills the person vaccinated. This can be a difficult balancing act, and new vaccines require testing to make sure they 1) work and 2) aren’t worse than the disease before being released for widespread use. None of that can be done overnight. It’s a completely different process than making testing kits.
Covid “only” 100,000 cases so far - that would be one thing if it was a consistent 100,000 case per year, but this thing isn’t even a year old. The infection rate is increasing daily. So comparing it to flu or cancer isn’t terribly useful at this point.
The 1976 Swine Flu situation had a vaccine quickly produced and pushed, only to have concerns that it caused Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
I understand what you mean. Everything has a timeline / pace to it and COVID-19 isn’t done it’s yearly cycle, so the final numbers are not known. But you can still do the math and project it’s pace and rates.
Here’s a comparison for you:
Common Flu (known as influenza) in this past winter season alone in the USA alone:
Infections: 32 million (US only)
Hospitalizations: 300,000 (US only)
Deaths: 18,000 (US only)
Coronavirus (COVID-19) so far this winter
Infections: 100,000+ (WORLDWIDE)
Hospitalization: n/a but 80% of cases are mild, do not require hospitalization and self-quarantine can recover on their own.
only 2-4% in the serious to critical stage.
Deaths: 3000+ (WORLDWIDE)
Reference: CDC data
Note, this is for the same timeline. COVID-19 has nothing on the common flu right now.
In the same timespan, 1.9 million people have died from cancer since COVID-19 was reported. None of that on TV eh?
Also 4.7 million new cancer cases reported since COVID-19 first case. Again, none of that shown on TV.
Imagine how the world would react if everyday on the news they reported each new case from cancer or the common flu
and reported each new death from every country in the world and see the numbers climb each day by 25,000 per day…
I’m not sure there’s a good answer for this. If you feel fine, you’d have no reason to not go to the doctor. If we want to test non-symptomatic people, even just healthcare workers, we’d have to do it every day. Just because you tested negative this morning doesn’t mean you won’t catch it while you’re at work today.
Even in China (Japan?) where they’ve set up drive through screening places, that is, you get tested without ever even getting out of your car, at the first station they speak with you for a few minutes to decide if you should be getting a test. No symptoms, no contact with people who have it etc, no test required.
As helpful as it may be to test everyone, we just don’t have hundreds of millions of tests ready to go.
To take it a step further, there’s a huge difference between taking a sample from someone and testing it vs injecting them with a med. No one will (directly) get hurt by a test kit. All sorts of side effects can occur with a med.