Thread by @SafetyinNumbrz

It's upsetting to learn that BC hospitals (AB too) are bunking C+ patients in with C- patients, guaranteeing more hospital outbreaks will infect people already sick enough to be in hospital for other reasons. That's bad. But it misses a key problem. 🧵
cbc.ca/news/canada/br…

The problem is that not all patients are even tested, and those that are tested may have false negatives. People are being treated in hallways & kept in waiting rooms... with a highly transmissible airborne virus, this means that actual C+ cases go unconfirmed & not isolated.

Many major hospitals have a small # of negative-air-pressure isolation suites. These are good at protecting everyone else. Your average ward bed does not come close. Modern hospitals usually aim for better-than-avg air exchange/filtration, but real world efficiency varies.

You can expect that the average store-front little medical center is unlikely to meet that standard either. And I would treat elevators, ambulances, public transit, and the satellite "professional" medical buildings with considerable caution for the same reasons.

It should surprise no one that all 5 hospitals in Calgary have outbreaks right now. They are treating people in hallways. Double-bunking. Not testing even all symptomatic infections. The brave, exhausted front-line folks are doing their best just to keep people alive...

But they don't have the resources to stem the tide. That would require more stringent air-quality regulations and infrastructure, training, universal respirator-quality masking, enforcement, and lower community transmission. This is about more than just beds, it's about access.

Because people with non-urgent conditions are justifiably avoiding care and delaying procedures to avoid getting COVID. I would do the same, thinking hard about that MRI or cancer screening right now. We need our leaders and health administrators to note that #COVIDisAirborne.

We need them to prioritize facility upgrades and interventions that remove this risk from our healthcare facilities. And we need better surveillance to ensure that untested cases are not unwittingly causing more outbreaks.

@threadreaderapp pls unroll