"Restez chez vous" said the French and Belgian governments.
"Stay at home" said the American government.
"Don't clutter hospitals, we have enough work, you might get covid-19 in the hospital. Come only if you have trouble breathing."
And yet. Many infected people have suffered from silent hypoxia, a symptom of Covid-19 where the oxygen saturation in the blood drops drastically without the patient being aware of it. When the discomfort arrives, it is too late, the person risks dying in the short term and must be admitted urgently in intensive care.
Explanation: the human body does not directly detect a drop in the oxygen level in the blood. Instead, the brain receives a signal when the level of carbon dioxide increases. But when the oxygen level drops without increasing the level of CO2 in the blood, you can pass out without realizing anything, like a high-flying aviator who forgot to put on his oxygen mask.
Thousands, if not tens of thousands of people around the world have died of happy hypoxia because they did not go to the hospital on time.
As an emergency doctor said, the emergencies were not saturated, it was the resuscitation services that were.
By advising people not to go to the hospital if they have suspicious symptoms (anosognosia, fever, cough), and to wait until the symptoms get worse before going to the hospital, many of these sick people have degraded slowly until their lungs are too bad for them to survive.
However, the measurement of oxygen saturation is done using a very simple small device, the oximeter, which is fixed at your fingertip and which detects possible hypoxia in a few seconds. This device was invented in 1942.
And hypoxia can be treated before requiring resuscitation. For example, if the patient has a pulmonary embolism, doctors may give them an anticoagulant. If the patient has an over-infection, doctors may give them antibiotics. All of this could have been done in the hospital, and even on an outpatient basis, by city doctors.
But it wasn’t done. The hospitals found themselves in the paradoxical situation where the emergency services were almost empty, due to the general confinement of the population at home and the severe confinement of the sick people in their home room, and the resuscitation services were saturated, due to the non-early management of pulmonary embolism and secondary infections.
The city's medical offices were deserted, due to government propaganda telling the population that there was no possible treatment and that the doctors can only prescribe paracetamol. Doctors' freedom to prescribe has been trampled on by heinous decrees, with horrible and fatal consequences.
This inhuman and absurd policy has led to the saturation of resuscitation services and the avoidable death of thousands of people.