Balu Bhaskar, a specialist in critical care medicine in Australia, while appreciating the measures taken by the Central and State governments to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including the nationwide 21-day lockdown, has said that ventilators essential for critically-ill patients should be used judiciously and sensibly.
Putting patients with severe respiratory distress syndrome on ventilators needs expertise and daily care. “The current practice of stockpiling ventilators and providing ventilator support for patients with stretched resources can actually be counterproductive,” Dr. Bhaskar told The Hindu over phone on Wednesday.
Dr. Bhaskar, who is a Fellow of the College of Chest Physicians (FCCP), USA, and Fellow of the College of Intensive Care Medicine (FCICM), Australia, has over 20 years of experience in the field of critical care and was ICU consultant during the SARS epidemic in 2002 and two swine flu epidemics. He was senior consultant and supervisor of training in critical care medicine at Prince Charles Hospital, Brisbane, and is now director of intensive care services, American Hospital, Dubai.
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Health departments, he said, should ensure that experts in mechanical ventilation are available round-the-clock to manage critically-ill patients.
Regarding the rise of COVID-19 cases in India, Dr. Bhaskar said evidence indicated that for a country with a population of 1.3 billion, the number of positive cases and deaths seemed too low to warrant drastic action. “We have no reports of hospitals getting overwhelmed or people dying unattended of fever or shortness of breath in India. But, the best way to overcome the pandemic is by further ramping up measures to find, isolate, test, treat and trace during this three-week lockdown,” he said.
Considering the size of the country and the economic impact of the pandemic, he said India had done well or even better when compared to developed countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. to counter the disease.
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