I worked twelve hours in the city today. My partner and I lucked out as far as the COVID calls went. I heard a ton of them go out, including a couple of cardiac arrests that sounded like they fit the bill of a person not feeling well for a couple of days with a fever, arresting at home. There were also an increasing number of COVID patients being discharged and taken to special COVID capable nursing homes. Crews still have to wear their full PPE on these calls. We did eight calls, and maybe there was a stealth COVID in the bunch — and we now not only wear masks on all our calls, we mask all of our patients– but nothing that stood out like the calls I was doing last week. I had two people with pretty severe dehydration who answered no to all the COVID questions, and had decent pulse saturations in the 90s. My partner and I had a number of EDP-emotionally disturbed person calls–and for the first time in a long awhile– a what we call “lawyeritis” call where the patient was clearly not injured but was looking to sue a store where she allegedly slipped and fell. Normally we do a lot of these — people in minor motor vehicle accidents, holding their necks and backs and moaning in whispers. Lately, people can get pretty smashed up and still not want to go to the hospital out of Corona Fear, but maybe that is changing. We did one heroin overdose who came around with stimulation and we spend over a hour by the river watching the fire department boat look for a man who jumped up the Founder’s bridge. He wasn’t found, and my guess with the way the Connecticut River was flowing, he may have been carried all the way to Long Island Sound. Once the operation went from rescue stage to recovery stage, we were dismissed.
Each day I have worked I have noticed new changes and safeguards being added. Today our company had one of our employees at the hospital talking to all the crews, discussing the proper way to take off PPE and how best to disinfect out supplies. At then at the end of the day, they have another employee who disinfects all the equipment we bring in from the heart monitor to the portable radios and even the keys to the narcotics box. One of the hospitals opened up an outdoor triage tent where the hospital registrars and the triage nurses were on the other side of clear plastic from us, which made it hard for me to hear being half deaf from 30 years of sirens and having to hear a soft spoken nurse through her N95 and then through the plastic and then competing with the howling spring wind.
After a big rise in the numbers yesterday, today saw statewide hospitalizations with their smallest net gain in the last two weeks. The newspaper (for me it is now an app on my phone) had an article about Connecticut beginning to plan for reopening the state. It said we are still a long way off, but at least they are talking about how to do it.
An unprecedented plan to re-open Connecticut after coronavirus could include surveillance, confinement and extensive testing, but it raises questions about privacy rights
I am home now and hopefully will have a better night sleep than I did last night when my thoughts would not be still.
Peace to all.
