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Every patient entering the hospital to receive medical care for anything at all, and anyone entering a clinic with respiratory symptoms, was forced to undergo a Covid-19 PCR test – something that’s never been done in past viral outbreaks. These PCR tests are still not FDA-approved and are being used under “Emergency Use Authorization” issued more than a year and a half ago, and don’t differentiate Covid-19 from seasonal influenza infections. Virtually every respiratory infection, including pneumonia, tests positive for a viral component, hence more Covid-19 cases.
Yet Covid-19 has been treated differently than past respiratory influenza and cold viruses.
Doctors failed to prescribe appropriate antibiotics for the bacterial secondary infections that are what kill patients with pneumonia. They failed to prescribe antibiotics for outpatients patients and often ignored or failed to examine patients for symptoms that would normally be treated with antibiotics or prescribed prophylactic antibiotics. Fear of spreading Covid-19 was used as an excuse even among critically ill patients, for example, to not perform bronchoscopic cultures to identify pathogens and not perform other diagnostic procedures to look for other causes for respiratory symptoms (such pulmonary embolism or congestive heart failure) that would normally have been done.
A study just published on August 25, 2021 in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine addressed some of these concerns. Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh performed bronchoscopy tests on all ventilated Covid-19 patients in the ICU and found that shortly after admission, 21% of all patients put on a ventilator had community-acquired bacterial superinfections that were responsive to antibiotics, including Streptococcus and methicillin-sensitive Staph aureus. Bacterial superinfections increased to 44% of patients 48 hours or more later.
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With the focus on Covid-19, conventional infection control and prevention practices were thrown out the window. The results of all of these Covid-19 policies should have been anticipated.
A very disturbing study was just published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology from the National Healthcare Safety Network (CDC) — the largest Hospital-Acquired Infection surveillance system in the country. It found huge increases in hospital-caused infections in patients last year.
Central line-associated bloodstream infections: 47 percent increase
Ventilator-associated events: 44.8 percent increase
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA): 33.8 percent increase
Catheter-associated urinary tract infections: 18.8 percent increase
Without getting into the minutia, in a single year, these increases wiped out nearly a decade of improvements in reducing hospital-acquired infections.