All tagged coronavirus

Legacy media finally catches up: Covid patients are oxygen-starved and do poorly on ventilators

By TATIANA PROPHET

Doctors at Providence Hospital in Seattle observed that the very first known U.S. patient to have Covid-19 was suffering from a lack of oxygen. That was back in January 2020.

The unnamed patient, who reported to urgent care after four days of fever and a dry cough, was tested due to having just returned from Wuhan, China. After testing positive for 2019-nCoV, he was hospitalized on January 21 in an isolation room.

At first, his blood-oxygen saturation levels were within the normal 96%-98% range, and he did not have shortness of breath, but did have a cough and two days of nausea and vomiting, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. A chest x-ray on day 3 showed no abnormalities.

Patient zero was never put on a ventilator; instead, his doctors noted growing evidence of pneumonia couple with low blood-oxygen saturation rates. He received supplemental oxygen, two kinds of antibiotics for a possible hospital-derived infection — and experimental drug Remdesivir for compassionate use.

Politifact: Test kit refusal by U.S. rated false

Victoria Knight and Jon Greenberg, PolitiFact

During Sunday night’s debate, while leveling criticism at President Donald Trump’s handling of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Trump administration refused to get coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.</p><p>“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said.