My fear is that in our efforts to help our patients, if an outbreak occurred here, our efforts, which are all based loosely on triage, would not only fall short, but actually cause it spread.
Quoting: Aravoth 35282601 How?
Because initially we wouldn't isolate anyone. Like I said in the op. Someone with a headache and fever is not an emergency. Most of time a person showing symptoms would be hanging out in the waiting room with everyone else until a room opened up.
I remember once when a patient came to the hospital during the swine flu outbreak, when it first began. We put the patient in the ER initially. The rooms have these yellow lines on the floor, and we were all told not to cross it. As if a piece of yellow tape on the floor is going to stop a virus from floating right over it.
The ER in my hospital is new. individual rooms, and heavy glass doors. But in a lot of other hospitals, the only thing separating an infected patient from someone else is a curtain. Literally, just a curtain.
Even on the hospital floors, alot of places still use duel occupancy patient rooms. So what happens if you have a 300 bed hospital, but almost every room is duel occupancy? I'll tell you, either everyones roommate gets infected, or all those duel occupancy rooms become single occupancy, and the amount of people that the hospital can handle just got halved.
We deal with heart attacks, trauma, dehydration, strokes, and sniffles. Most hospitals have no reason, whatsoever, to invest in serious isolation techniques. Look what happens when patients start getting c-diff. All they do is close the door, and pull out an "isolation cart". Which only has a thin tissue paper like garment and some gloves. this works for c-diff, but a viral outbrak is not c-diff
Sure, we put HEPA filters on when going into a reverse isolation room for a patient with TB or something, but again, there are only a finite number of those rooms.
And again, all of this is based on traditional field triage methods. putting people in groups, and bringing the most serious cases in first. For a hospital, that means respiratory distress, and chest pain, period. I you are at that stage with Ebola, you won't even make it into the hospital. You would come in with a headache, fever, or sore throat, none of which are an emergency.
