With a combination of luck, new hires and creative reorganizing of staff and patients, Utah’s hospitals haven’t had to eject anyone from intensive care units due to the coronavirus. But several doctors say the solutions still amount to rationing, with the quality of care deteriorating as hospitals are stretched thinner and thinner.
As governors and mayors grapple with an out-of-control pandemic, they are ratcheting up mask mandates and imposing restrictions on small indoor gatherings, which have been blamed for accelerating the spread of the coronavirus. But while such measures carry the weight of law, they are, in practical terms, unenforceable, and officials are banking on voluntary compliance instead.
Scientists are uncovering clues to explain how the coronavirus attacks the nervous system by studying a bizarre side effect of the infection that distorts sufferers’ sense of smell for months on end. Since the pandemic began, doctors have puzzled over why the coronavirus causes as many as 80% of patients to experience anosmia, a temporary loss of smell.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is advising overwhelmed local health officials to triage their coronavirus contact tracing efforts, writing that the latest infection surge is making it difficult to reach every close contact of Covid-positive patients in time to help contain the disease’s spread.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he is reopening an emergency COVID-19 field hospital on Staten Island as the number of infections keep climbing, the first such facility in the state to relaunch since the state partly tamed the pandemic over the summer.