Friday, March 27, 2020

Portland Health Provider Secures PPE

My sister is an in-home visiting physical therapist for Providence Health & Services in Portland (Oregon). Here is what Providence has done in the face of a shortage of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Their efforts have been very successful, and, I think, deserve to be highlighted.

Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D. and Jeff Kaas Interview from PSJH Digital on Vimeo.

3 comments:

David in Cal said...

Abbott Laboratories is unveiling a coronavirus test that can tell if someone is infected in as little as 5 minutes, and is so small and portable it can be used in almost any health-care setting.

The medical-device maker plans to supply 50,000 tests a day starting April 1,


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/abbott-launches-5-minute-covid-19-test-for-use-almost-anywhere

Ned said...

This seems to be typical of how the White House operates now:

Trump sparked 'mass confusion' in his own administration with chaotic orders on ventilators

Trump's tweets caused "mass confusion" within his own administration, as officials scrambled to determine whether he was actually invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up supplies of desperately needed medical equipment, or if he was just spouting off.

"Three senior Trump administration officials who have worked on these matters each independently told The Daily Beast that they were befuddled by the Friday tweets, and did not know what the president's posts actually meant," the publication reports. "Each official said that they were, at the time, still trying to get clarity from Trump or other senior officials on what, if anything, new had just been decreed."

It seems, however, that nothing concrete has changed and the president is still relying on voluntary contributions from manufacturers ...

David in Cal said...

:New French study shows very impressive results:

In-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the team found a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74-year old patient still in intensive care unit. The team also found that, by administering hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin, they were able to observe an improvement in all cases, except in one patient who arrived with an advanced form, who was over the age of 86, and in whom the evolution was irreversible, according to a new paper published today in IHU Méditerranée Infection.

“For all other patients in the cohort of 80 people, the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin resulted in a clinical improvement that appeared significant when compared to the natural evolution in patients with a definite outcome, as described in the literature. In a cohort of 191 Chinese inpatients, of whom 95% received antibiotics and 21% received an association of lopinavir and ritonavir, the median duration of fever was 12 days and that of cough 19 days in survivors, with a 28% case-fatality rate (18),” the research team said.

The team went on to say: “Thus, in addition to its direct therapeutic role, this association can play a role in controlling the disease epidemic by limiting the duration of virus shedding, which can last for several weeks in the absence of specific treatment. In our Institute, which contains 75 individual rooms for treating highly contagious patients, we currently have a turnover rate of 1/3 which allows us to receive a large number of these contagious patients with early discharge. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are extremely well-known drugs which have already been prescribed to billions of people.”

Cheers