USA has almost 330 million inhabitants. The infection is estimated to affect 60% of the population in any country. Let us put 50%, 165 million.
10% will require hospital admission. Of them 50%, that is to say 5% of the total, ICU bed with respirator. In other words, some 16 million people will require income. If measures were not taken in a few months, that number would have been reached. ICU admissions are being reduced through better oxygen treatment, medication and medical care in hospitals.
Until new patients are successfully treated before widespread inflammation occurs, many of them will have extensive damage to the internal organs, not just the lungs, generating a huge number of new chronic patients.
We do not know what percentage will be chronic but the few autopsies performed indicate an incredible destruction in many organs, so the percentage of chronic compared to those who recover after admission will be high.
Everything indicates that the immunity will be of limited duration, so if they fall ill again they will almost certainly die, at least today.
The future of those 16 million Americans would be very problematic. Either they die or they will generate considerable expense that will cause millions of families to go bankrupt.
Therefore, today, the logic dictates avoiding a massive contagion until there is a better medication. Vaccines, if any, will take longer than that new treatments. Meanwhile the outlook is very black, at the health and economic level, worldwide.
I have just read it. I already mentioned that in the few autopsies that have been done there is a massive internal damage.
Pulmones afectados de por vida y problemas de corazón: las secuelas del COVID-19 tras 'curarse'
[Spanish]
https://www.elespanol.com/ciencia/s...on-secuelas-covid-19-curarse/484951860_0.html
Lungs affected for life and heart problems: the aftermath of COVID-19 after 'healing'
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[ " 80% of patients infected with COVID-19 do not enter, so it will be very, very unlikely that there will be sequelae. 15% enter an inpatient facility and 5% require admission to a hospital unit. Critical. So, approximately, between
5% and 10% are the potential patients who could suffer some type of sequelae. But these are only estimates.
We do not have data yet, and it is still too early," he says. Javier De Miguel Díez, section chief in the Pulmonology Service of the Gregorio Mara ñón General University Hospital.. ]
[ "Approximately 6-8 weeks after discharge, the ideal would be to do a chest x-ray. If the patient is asymptomatic and the x-ray is fine, that's fine. But if he has symptoms or abnormalities on the x-ray, we would do a CT scan of the chest afterwards to see if there are sequelae. In some patients, they would also have to do some lung capacity tests. There is already a preliminary study carried out in China that shows that some patients can lose between
20% and 30% of their lung capacity," says De Miguel. But the first and most important thing is to identify which patients could be susceptible to it... ]
[ For example, and there is more and more literature on this, the virus causes
dermatological involvement . Even affectations in the digestive system ("many of the initial manifestations are diarrheal pictures, although we intuit that, then in the short and medium term it will not leave sequelae").
It is also being seen that this virus "has
cardiac, neurological and even
renal affectations, although the mechanism that produces them is not yet well understood." Therefore, "we have to be very aware in the future of all possible injuries that the virus may leave in the short or medium term," says this expert... ]
[ As she described, she increasingly saw more critical patients with
COVID-19 with
encephalopathies and delirium , who had hallucinations or who did not remember anything about their stay in the ICU. "We cannot assess the repercussion that this disease, this encephalopathy and this ICU admission will have on the mental capacities of our patients and how cognitive recovery will be : memory, calculation, abstract reasoning, language, etc", Velayos reflected.
Likewise, Vicente Gasull , coordinator of the SEMERGEN Mental Health Working Group, explains to this newspaper the importance of considering that "the patients who have been admitted to the ICU by COVID-19 have really suffered a serious process. The consequences that they present after a severe condition are multiple and very diverse. Thus, some have been described as pulmonary fibrosis,
ischemic heart disease, cardiomyopathy with heart failure, even cases of
fulminant myocarditis with a severe prognosis." ]
