State health officials are encouraged to see the number of COVID-19 patients who require ventilation has gone down, four days in a row. Assistant Secretary of the Office of Public Health Alex Billioux credits I-C-U doctors who are learning better methods in treating the virus.
“COVID patients don’t do as well if we push them on the ventilator early, so the idea is to use things like non-invasive methods, things you might have heard of in the press, like BiPAP.
A BiPAP pushes air into a person’s lungs and works much like a C-Pap machine.
Billioux highlights the efforts of the public in social distancing and uptick in good hygiene habits as a major contributing factor.
“If we start to relax any of those efforts, we wouldn’t want to be in a position where suddenly now we need all those ventilators that we are grateful not to need in the next comings days,” said Billioux.
Billioux says we are seeing now the results of public behaviors that started two weeks ago and while the trend is promising…
“We’re not yet ready to say that we are moving to a different level of infection from an individual, or in other words, we are not able to conclusively say that we need to move that number further than we have already,” said Billioux.
490 COVID-19 patients are on ventilators today, down from 519 yesterday.
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