Ever since the outbreak of Corona Virus, the medical fraternity has been trying to find out the best possible way to treat the infection.
The very fact that this was a new type of virus became evident due to its structure and the way it attacks the body had left the fraternity at a loss of ways to treat it.
During the early days, the first line of treatment meant aggressive treatment to save the person. People were delaying coming to hospital as they were not sure whether what they had was a common cold or virus infection.
As more data became available and as more cases came in it became clear as to how the virus was attacking and how it was spreading.
This lead to a host of advisories on how to stay safe and how to identify the attack and come in for treatment.
Later, autopsies conducted on those who had died showed up some very disturbing facts.
It was also documented that almost 90-95% people put on ventilators were ending up dead. Thus the utility of ventilators was rapidly discarded by the medical community world wide.
Some unrelated medicines like Remdesivir were providing relief to patients and these came into demand. This also lead to a huge black market for the drug that was in short supply due to manufacturing constraints.
Similarly HCQ (Chloroquine) too were considered as possibly life saving. A claim that did not pass muster later on.
What was later revealed in the autopsies is that the virus was causing, directly or indirectly, damage to many organs other than the lungs (which was the first organ that the medical community discovered to be affected by the virus).
It was discovered that the virus generated a disproportionate immune response in the infected person and those with other existing conditions were more likely to die from the attack.
This high response to the viral attack was seen in the lungs. And this lead to blood clots. As these blood clots traveled to different parts of the body, they rendered many vital organs to reduced function or even made these organs shut down. After this discovery, the doctors started adding blood thinners to the protocol.
The protocol is still evolving as doctors and medics discover new things.
They also realized that giving high flow oxygen to the victim was better than putting the patient on a ventilator.
Armed with all this learning, doctors today are much more confident of saving lives. And these changes in protocol also meant that the need of ICU beds was reduced along with that of ventilators.
Oxygen beds are what are now required.
Thus it is now possible to save patients if the come in on time, are tested and identified and then put of high dosage of nasal oxygen.
Therefore it became possible to take the patients out of a hospital and even confine him to a quarantine / treatment center which has these facilities.
Many large societies have thus approached the regulating authorities to allow them to use vacant spaces like community halls to set up Covid Care Centers within their societies.
Some societies in Bangalore have even got permission to set up such facilities from the local government and have started setting up such care centers in their vacant spaces.
In our opinion, Government of India and all local self governments should take note of this development and allow setting up of Covid Care centers on similar lines such that the load on public health care system goes down and patients get faster treatment within their familiar surroundings. Obviously the stigma attached to the infection will go down. And the patients can have home food too.
