En ocasiones, los pacientes infectados por el coronavirus llegan a estar internados hasta por seis semanas.
Now, for the first time since a wave of patients flooded their emergency rooms in March, Pascual and others on the front lines are expressing a feeling they say they haven’t felt in a long time — glimmers of hope. They say they have devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies many believe give today’s patients a better shot at survival than those who came only a few weeks before.
To be clear, these are not therapies proved to kill or stop the virus. They range from protocols to diagnose and treat dangerous, but sometimes invisible, breathing problems that can be an early warning of covid-19 in some people, to efforts to reduce the illness’s severity or length. At this stage, they are still experimental approaches by doctors desperate to find ways to help gravely ill people and throwing everything they can think of at the problem.
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One challenge to therapies for covid-19, Pascual said, is that the havoc caused by the virus seems to last a long time — in some patients two, three or even six weeks. Critically ill patients may need many different treatments in that period to stay alive — blood pressure medications for the heart, dialysis for their kidneys, ventilators for breathing. If they can be kept stable for that length of time until doctors can remove the support of machines, he said, more patients just might have a chance.
“The reassuring thing is this virus, like others, eventually burns out,” Pascual said. “In the end, it’s a waiting game.”