Coronavirus Updates, Important Information, and Ancedotal Experience

Tarrant said:

Ohio just put all bars and restaurants on notice, as of 9pm tonight they are all closed.

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On the phone with my mom and she said that! That's drastic.

TJT said:

Getting a lot of on-site calls you have to go to for the dreaded Zombie Plague or what?

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So far not so much but I expect this to change in the future. The inner-city of St. Louis (probably also most inner-cities really) is absolutely full of cripplingly retarded people who WILL call 911 as soon as they get sick.

We do have new protocols in place though.

Dispatch is now asking all the pertinent questions about travel and flu-like symptoms on all calls, no matter the chief complaint. If they suspect an at-risk patient they include "ICM" in their dispatch which means 'Infectious Criteria Met'. At this point our medics are supposed to don PPE (gown, goggles, N95 mask, and gloves) before entering the building. So far we have had only one ICM dispatch sent. Again though, I suspect this number will rise as time passes.

We have set every crew's off-time to be one hour earlier than normal (in which we are taking a huge hit to our Unit-Hours) so that they can come back to base an hour earlier and fully decontaminate their rig and their gear. This happens at the end of every single shift regardless of what types of patients they might have had throughout the day. They are to spray the Sani-Clean spray on all surfaces ceiling to floor and wipe down literally everything. And we mean EVERYTHING. It is supposed to take them no less than 40 minutes to complete this task.

We have an annual dinner to award people for years of service and another dinner to award Clinical Saves. Both of these have been canceled. We also do a monthly Town-Hall/Training session which tends to house 20-40 people. These have been canceled for now as well.

We have a new protocol that when responding to any general respiratory call, that only one person is to enter the domicile, keep a 6 foot distance from the patient, ask the pertinent questions, and then make a general 'sick or not-sick' determination based on their best judgement. If they determine the patient might have flu-like symptoms, they are to exit the residence, then they and their partner are to don PPE, then enter the residence and treat the patient and bring them to the ambulance. Once in the ambulance the 'tech' (the person who stays in the back with the patient) keeps their PPE on. The driver then doffs their PPE, keeping the N95 mask on, and drives to the hospital. Then the driver dons a third set of PPE and the two of them take the patient into the hospital and follow all directions from the staff there.

Once the patient is dropped off in the hospital room, both crew members doff their PPE. Then the tech goes and writes his report as normal while the driver dons the fourth set of PPE and goes and does a full head-to-toe decon of the ambulance.

So one call, with an at-risk patient, should use up 4 sets of PPE. After that they call the Supervisors who will arrange for them to be given another 4-set of PPE gear.

Every nursing home in the area and also the VA facilities are doing general screening and temperature checks of our people before they are allowed to enter the nursing home. If there are any failures, their names are written down onto some sort of black-list and they are not allowed into the nursing home. Some of the nursing homes however are allowing us to do the patient transfer in the lobby rather than in the patient's room as normal.

Any crew member who exhibits symptoms is sent home by the Supervisors. This means we are now allowed to send people home 'without punishment' to them. Payment of their time is still up in the air at this point and is being decided by the upper-crust corporate types which are many many levels above me. I expect a decision on this point within the next week. Most people a level or two higher than me are optimistic that those who are sent home will eventually be compensated. Maybe not at %100, but also not %0. We will see where that number lands.

We expect that many of our people will not only get sick, but will get sick first. What we must not do is allow our own sick people to get our own, or other people, sick even faster. If our entire fleet is going to get this virus, it is better that the timeline of when they get it is stretched out as much as possible. If we all get sick slowly over the course of the next 6 months, then we might be able absorb that and continue to serve the community and continue to provide our service. If we all get sick over the course of the next 6 days or 6 weeks, then we might be actually fucked.... and by extension so might a lot of people in St. Louis who need our services.

I feel a bit like a canary in a coal mine (as an operation more-so than as an individual) and I am curious to see how it all plays out. I'm happy to answer any questions as we all go through this. I feel like the best medicine here, is truth.

Alex said:

On the phone with my mom and she said that! That's drastic.

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That does seem a bit drastic.

AngryGerbil said:

That does seem a bit drastic.

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People can't be trusted to self isolate. So closing schools will have no real effect and be nothing more than a financial burden on citizens unless everything is shut down.

And yea, this is getting beyond fucked.

Khane said:

People can't be trusted to self isolate. So closing schools will have no real effect and be nothing more than a financial burden on citizens unless everything is shut down.

And yea, this is getting beyond fucked.

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All day I've been talking with my wife and family and we're trying to figure out amongst us where we are going to draw the line with the social distancing.

It's not so easy a line to draw. Big stuff like NBA and NFL seem obvious. The question is, how small do we go? My Mom has already canceled next week's Sunday dinner and also Easter. However, my wife went to her girlfriend's house last night to hang out with her husband and 2 kids. I got Taco Bell yesterday. My Dad went to the gym this morning. And we ALL have to go to the grocery store and the gas stations. I mean, some stuff just has to keep going no matter what. Do restaurants count? I'm not sure. Obviously if a single restaurant decides to close itself down then that's fine, but should the government necessarily mandate it? Hard to tell.

It's hard to know exactly where to draw the line.

It's only hard to know where to draw the line because there is no real danger for most of us. If this was truly deadly and devastating we'd all be on board. Instead we are shutting literally everything down because of 3000 confirmed cases in 2 months.

Khane said:

People can't be trusted to self isolate. So closing schools will have no real effect and be nothing more than a financial burden on citizens unless everything is shut down.

And yea, this is getting beyond fucked.

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Yeah they just did this in Illinois. People were lining up outside bars in Chicago for their St Patricks day bar crawls yesterday like idiots.

If you have the means and aren't staying home you're the worst imo. Astounded by the number of what i thought were intelligent "friends" that think it's cool/tough to flout a pandemic.

Khane said:

It's only hard to know where to draw the line because there is no real danger for most of us. If this was truly deadly and devastating we'd all be on board. Instead we are shutting literally everything down because of 3000 confirmed cases in 2 months.

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But don't you see that the spread of this thing is covert and exponential? Don't be so short-sighted.

Even we medical people are at a loss as to how to stop this thing. It has a 14 day incubation period and you are contagious within those 14 days. By the time you display symptoms, you've already had the virus for 2 weeks and have already exposed god-knows how many people to it. That's literally the whole problem. Watch that Joe Rogan interview. Dude says SARS was relatively easy to clamp-down on because the incubation period was much shorter. COVID is a whole other thing.

We here in EMS are reacting to people with flu-like and with fevers, and that's all well and good, but the truth is that once a person has flu-like and has a fever, they have been spreading the disease for many days prior to that.

Look at Italy. Italy took your exact same position and now they are finding themselves overwhelmed.

I hate to be this guy but I will be: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". You either believe in this old adage or you don't.

Captain Suave said:

When I was a kid we went to Cape Hatteras and caught the legal limit of bluefish during a feeding frenzy (100 fish per person). After spending 10 hours cleaning the fuckers, we put the fillets on dry ice and it stayed good until we finished it six months later. My mom bought a book, "101 Ways to Cook Bluefish" and we legit tried all of them.

I still can't eat bluefish 30 years later.

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We had a small pond on our property growing up and my dad stocked it with bluegill and some catfish. He gave it a year and after that we had all the catfish and bluegill we could catch.

Picasso3 said:

If you have the means and aren't staying home you're the worst imo. Astounded by the number of what i thought were intelligent "friends" that think it's cool/tough to flout a pandemic.

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I was talking to my sister and she's already stressed having to keep my nephews home and entertained for at least the next month. She was talking about how they had bought some supplies and stuff and were planning to be shut-ins, but then she tells me that she's still going to the gym and do her workouts. I was like wtf? That's possibly one of the places to easily catch the shit if someone sick had been there.

Kiroy said:

I've got a 2 acre pond full of turtles and catfish. It's filled via canals from the irrigation district that flow through tons of property I really wonder how much round up is built up in those fish lol

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Yeah that sounds sketchy lol. Our pond was fed by an the same underground spring that fed out well water.

Big Phoenix said:

At some point you have to balance your response with the long term negative effects of your response. You can shut every thing but down but at the same time you are basically killing a number of big parts of the economy.

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"Killing".

May I counter with the word "Depressing"?

No doubt that the economy will be depressed. There is no doubt.

I look at my own company and I see two scenarios. Either we start doing the 'prevention' stuff now, and we suffer through a depression...

Or we do no such prevention, bank entirely on 'cure' (which we don't actually have in any imaginable sense), and we suffer a 'kill'.

There is no scenario here in which we don't suffer an economic depression. Come to grips with it.

It's going to happen.

But Depression is vastly preferable to Kill.

If we want to Kill our economy? We bury our heads in the sand like China and Italy and pretend that this is 'just the sniffles', wait until the healthcare system is overloaded, and then wonder how we got here.