Dr. Uri Galanta, the director of the coronavirus ward at Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva, said on Thursday that the Israeli public lacks awareness of the true risks of COVID-19, Yisrael Hayom reported.
“There is a gap between what my friends and I in the health care system see and what the public understands,” Dr. Galanta said.
“We, the medical staff, feel like we’re fighting a war of attrition, fighting daily for patients’ lives, but when I try to explain how dangerous the illness is, I sometimes meet with zero comprehension.”
According to Galanta, the public believes that the coronavirus is only dangerous to the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions but aren’t aware that “pre-existing conditions” could be as simple as a beer belly.
“For example, a bit of a belly at age 50, which plenty of people have, is also a high-risk factor,” Galanta said. “In my COVID intensive care unit, there are people on ventilators ages 40-60, without preexisting conditions, and that’s hard for outsiders to grasp.”
“The progress of the illness in the most serious coronavirus patients, the ones in intensive care, is very different from what we see with other serious illnesses. The mortality rate for COVID patients on ventilators or on ECMO machines is very high, even when compared to other illnesses like the flu or to patients on ventilators for other conditions.”
“Half of the COVID patients on ventilators don’t survive, compared to 15% of patients on ventilators in the ICU with other conditions. These are numbers we aren’t used to seeing. The ICU staff needs to feel that they’re succeeding, and with COVID, our victories are unfortunately few, which leads to frustration at the professional level.”
Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health at the Health Ministry, conveyed a similar message over the weekend when speaking to leaders of the Israeli Arab sector.
“There is apparently a lack of understanding of this disease,” she stressed. “There are young people aged in their 30s and 40s in serious condition, critical. They are on ventilators. It’s no longer 80-year-olds with four underlying health conditions and terminal cancer. It’s young people. People don’t understand this and they are inviting 1,000 people to weddings.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
And yet, acc. to the statistics Israel just put out a couple days ago, out of 130000+ cases, only 60 people under 60 have died. Every death is a tragedy, but those odds are hardly a cause for mass hysteria, lockdowns, school closings and ruined economies.
Maybe the public perception is more accurate. We are seeing hundreds of people who tested positive with little or no symptoms. The medical staff are only seeing the really severe cases.