This is what I’ve been wondering about. It is, however, just an unsourced item on Facebook, so not necessarily from an ER nurse at all. But I have been wondering – if Trump really did have a bad case and they really did fix it the way they said, why aren’t they fixing all the serious cases that way? What’s the deal here? What are we not being told?
“Copied and pasted from an ER nurse —ER nurse: Allow me to clarify some things as someone who’s taken care of a lot of covid patients. Trump is fine. And he will be fine. That’s because when he was MILDLY symptomatic, we threw all the things we throw at crashing patients at him. We didn’t make him wait. We didn’t make him meet criteria. We didn’t wait until he was almost vented. Trump got care that you can’t. After he trashed this pandemic. Let that sink in. He got care when he had a sniffle that we can’t give our patients until they are almost dead and it’s a Hail Mary attempt. So he will come out and say this was nothing and we have the best drugs and open up fully but don’t be blind to the fact that we can’t treat people the way he was treated because not everyone can pay for it, we don’t have the resources and there is a criteria in place that he was able to forgo. That, my friends, is privilege. You get what you vote for.
I can’t provide source link.”
That’s not entirely accurate – they didn’t throw all the things at him, unless they lied about it: he was never on a ventilator. If he had been he wouldn’t have been able to bounce back that quickly, as far as I know – being on one rips the hell out of your throat and you can’t talk right away, plus you’re wiped out. It takes weeks to come back from it.
But they threw some things at him that more mild cases don’t get – but maybe more severe cases do? I guess it depends on how swamped the local ERs are.
But it does seem fair to say “We didn’t make him wait. We didn’t make him meet criteria. We didn’t wait until he was almost vented. Trump got care that you can’t.”
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10 responses to “We didn’t wait until he was almost vented”
The Lincoln Project posted this ’80s infomercial of Trump’s pitch for Regeneron (which is really the name of a company, not a treatment).
Way back in March, the earliest data from Hubei province on COVID-19 was 80% mild, 14% severe, 5% critical, 2% fatal; and everything I’ve seen since has been broadly consistent with that breakdown.
What was anomalous about Trump’s progression was not that he recovered (most people do) or that he recovered w/o a ventilator (most people do). What was anomalous is that he went from first report (Oct 02) to hospital within 24 hours. COVID doesn’t usually make people that sick that fast.
There is speculation (plausible to me) that Trump tested positive some days earlier. They were hoping to keep it quiet and ride the disease out without having to tell anyone. But I’m sure his doctors were watching him like a hawk, and the minute his blood O2 dropped they hustled him off to the hospital. (Reports I’ve seen are that it dipped to 90%-95%, which is not actually that bad.)
He was treated aggressively in hospital; he got better care than most of us could get or could afford. But it isn’t clear that any of that made any difference.
The other thing I’ve been thinking was anomalous (thinking along with a lot of people) is that he was having breathing difficulty Friday and was all better Monday. That seems a lot faster than usual.
I wondered if his puffing on balcony night wasn’t simply that he hardly ever walks anywhere, let alone up the stairs.
In keeping with most bullies, Trump is a coward when his own hide is in danger. It has been repoerted by unnamed insiders that he was scared of becoming ‘one of the diers’, and so he demanded the very best no matter what. This demand, backed by the fact that he is the president, would have circumvented all the usual measures forcing doctors to be judicious in their prescribing, leading to his mild case getting teh treatment normally reserved for the serious cases preventatively – rather than reactively.
Wellllll if that happened I think it’s far more because he’s the prez than because he’s a whiner. But I don’t think it’s the case that treatment for severe covid works on mild covid, on account of how different things are going on with severe covid.
Update to my comment #1 — YouTube took down the Lincoln Project infomercial at the link I posted above (1M views) because the composer George Streicher disputed their use of his Generic ’90s TV Music.
But the Regeneron infomercial is still on the Lincoln Project Facebook (1M views) and Twitter (5M views).
From the OP:
I took We didn’t wait until he was almost vented. to mean that the treatment he received would usually only be given to patients so severely ill that they were on the verge of requiring ventilation rather than suggesting that Trump had been ventilated. I’d say that it wasn’t so much lying as unclear phrasing.
But I wasn’t disputing “We didn’t wait until he was almost vented,” I was disputing “we threw all the things we throw at crashing patients at him.” They didn’t; they didn’t put him on a ventilator.
I know what you were disputing, and without that final line about not waiting until he was almost vented I would have suspected either lying or at best exaggeration over what treatments he’d had, too. It’s just that the line about not waiting suggested to me that what was said was misleading but not deliberately so. It reads like something written in haste and the result is not as clear as it could have been.
Short of ventilation, we threw all the things… is probably what we were meant to understand from what was written, it just didn’t come across that way.