(The Atlantic) It’s hard to tell from the data who’s still getting hospitalized with COVID. One frontline worker shares her observations.
Last week, 3,171 COVID deaths were reported in the United States. In the past seven days, an average of 13 COVID deaths were reported each day in Los Angeles County, California, the country’s most populous county. Although this February’s death rate is lower than that of the previous two, COVID patients are still fighting for their lives.
Isabel Pedraza is the director of the intensive-care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, overseeing the care of some of the hospital’s sickest patients. Someone treated in her unit may have had a heart attack, been in a traumatic accident, or be battling COVID on a ventilator.
Pedraza told me that this winter, her unit is seeing fewer COVID cases than expected. (Patients with non-life-threatening COVID cases—the majority of those in the hospital—are treated by her colleagues “on the floor,” where they aren’t monitored quite as closely.) As for the patients who do wind up in the ICU with COVID, she told me, treating them is much less stressful than when the virus first arrived. By now “it’s a lot less chaotic,” she said. “It feels like we have a path and an algorithm, and ways that we know we can save people.” At the same time, Pedraza said, more people are coming into her unit severely ill for other reasons—such as kidney and heart problems—than before the pandemic began.