Sanja Jelic’s worst day in almost two decades as a critical care doctor in New York City was April 6.
Faced with an unmanageable influx of coronavirus patients at Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s step-down unit, an intermediate care ward, Jelic made an unorthodox decision: she asked those struggling to breathe to roll onto their bellies while they waited for intubation to mechanically ventilate their inflamed lungs.
It wasn’t a random guess. Laying patients in the stomach-down prone position is known to improve oxygenation in sedated, intubated patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. But there was no guarantee the same would hold true for wakeful Covid patients who were gasping for air.
“We had to buy time,” Jelic, who is also an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, recalled in an interview. “I remember, the first three patients really had a dramatic improvement in their oxygenation.”
In the absence of a cure, doctors like Jelic were left relying in part on trial and error, but months into the most destructive pandemic in a century, their collective experience is starting to build a framework of how best to cope with coronavirus patients.
As many as 1,000 Covid-related research papers are being released daily ahead of peer review and publication, according to Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. “Our goal is to see that the learnings from science are as quickly as possible channeled into impacts for patients and communities,” she told reporters in Geneva on Thursday.
‘How You Do It’
The collective experience may be showing results. U.S. deaths, which often ranged between 2,000 and 3,000 a day in April and May, have mostly remained below 1,000 and in the low hundreds since the beginning of June.
The WHO is collating data from countries to identify crucial elements that reduce mortality. These include how health systems triage Covid-19 patients, how they protect those vulnerable to more serious complications, and the speed with which they provide intensive care.
The goal is to create a tool box that will enable doctors to provide better care for the full range of patients with Covid-19, which has turned out to be more than just a respiratory disease, said Sylvie Briand, the WHO’s director for global infectious hazard preparedness.
“It’s not only what you do -- sometimes at this level there is no difference -- but it’s how you do it,” Briand said in an interview.