peaheezy

Bit of an unusual question here.

I’m a private practice Neurosurgery physician assistant at a large hospital in NJ. Our MICU is full, the SICU is starting to add vented covid or suspected covid patients, the medical step down is now full of non-covid ICU patients and the orthopedic nurses are being pulled to medical step down beds that are being created from other units. It’s only been 10 days since our first case...

My team is not hospital employed but we are close with the Surgical ICU team and have at least some experience managing critical patients. We all feel like if the medicine teams call for help we should do our best to answer but none of us us much experience with vents, vasopressors or ARDS at this point. I’ve been perusing my old copy of The ICU Book but I’m at last coming to my question, any resources you recommend to get someone up to speed as quickly as possible to at least help medical teams in dealing with critical Covid cases? Speaking with some critical care friends/residents they do not have enough staff and will need help pretty soon. Meanwhile our service is quiet because elective surgery is cancelled.

Don’t touch your face. I know you’ve probably been told so many times but it’s critical. Virus and other bugs will get on our hands, it’s inevitable we touch too much stuff to avoid it. But virus on hands isn’t infectious, it’s when that virus moves to mucous membranes in our eyes, nose and mouth that we get sick. Washing your hands every twenty minutes but rubbing your eyes or biting your nails is still dangerous.

God it’s so hard not to though, I work in healthcare and still notice I touch my eyes sometimes. It’s getting better but I curse myself every time I do it.

Got any sources for that? The CDC and our own ID experts at the hospital where I work consider it a droplet precaution virus.