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Message: Re: Trial Inclusion criteria #6
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Jan 12, 2022 09:43AM

Here's more from a recent news article - two quotes of interest - and one quote suggests that we should still be seeing some patients who qualify:

Their chest X-rays are indistinguishable from what Goldberg saw with the sickest patients in previous waves.

 

 

'It’s making people really sick in a different way': How Omicron affects hospital patients

Author of the article:
Sharon Kirkey
Publishing date:
Jan 06, 2022  •  5 days ago

 

Emerging research suggests Omicron infects and lodges in the bronchi, and less so deep in the lungs, like Delta does, which could explain why it’s spreading so quickly but causing less severe disease.

“Of all the patients we have with Omicron, the vast, vast majority are going home,” Legome said. Of those hospitalized, “It tends to be the patients who would be admitted otherwise: You’re 90 years old, you have underlying pulmonary disease, heart failure, you have a hip replacement, you don’t get along well at baseline and then you have Omicron on top of that and you just can’t get out of bed. It’s that type that we’re seeing more of,” he said.

“It does clearly feel like the ones that seem to be more symptomatic tend to be the ones that are not fully vaccinated or boosted, or vaccinated at all.”

Canadian doctors are also seeing lots of COVID in emergency departments. “And it’s all Omicron,” radiologist Dr. David Jacobs tweeted Wednesday morning in the final hours of a long overnight shift at Humber River Hospital in Toronto.

“The cases coming to the emergency room are basically all comers,” Jacobs said in an interview. They range from those with mild symptoms and no shortness of breath, but who are worried and want to be tested, up to those with seriously “robust” pneumonias.

Of those sick enough to get a chest X-ray or CT scan of the chest, “those patients, for the most part, don’t have a lot of findings,” said Jacobs, president of the Ontario Association of Radiologists. Most of them are also vaccinated. “They’ll either be completely normal chest X-rays or they’ll be very subtle, very mild pneumonia.”

A very small number of X-rays, however, are “downright horrible,” he said. The horrible ones, where the lungs are whited out, with more fluid in the air spaces than air, are seen in the unvaccinated, as well as the immune compromised — people with kidney failure, cancer patients on chemotherapy, organ transplant recipients — and the frail elderly with waning immunity and so many underlying health problems they simply can’t cope with even a mild case of COVID pneumonia.

The severe cases look the same as the cases seen during the height of Delta and the first wave, Jacobs said. “Why that scares me is that it tells me that this virus is as bad a player as any other before it. It can be a milder virus, but it can also be quite severe,” and the only real differentiators are vaccination status, immune status and age.

“You don’t want to spread panic, but you also don’t want to be blasé about what can be a very dangerous virus,” Jacobs said.

AND:

In Montreal, “the unvaccinated continue to populate the ICU,” said Dr. Peter Goldberg, former director of critical care medicine at the McGill University Health Centre. “They can be very ill, indeed.” Their chest X-rays are indistinguishable from what Goldberg saw with the sickest patients in previous waves.

Thankfully, however, “We’re not seeing the same voraciousness of the virus as we did in the first waves, otherwise, given the prevalence in the community, there would be people getting tended to on the street,” Goldberg said.

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