In my area it seems that the worst of the COVID pandemic has passed, we are now seeing maybe 1-2 COVID patients at a time in the unit, and we've even had a couple stretches of a few days with no COVID positive patients. That's been a nice change from the past year.
What hasn't been a nice change is that a part of the population of patients we are seeing are so sick that they are coming in and dying relatively quickly. Especially young alcoholics (30-50 years old), with such profound liver failure that they come in and only last a few days. We've also had more cardiac arrests related to drug overdoses and even alcohol intoxication. For the past year there has definitely been an uptick in the number of cardiac arrests due to cocaine being laced with fentanyl (or maybe they're looking for the fentanyl specifically in addition to cocaine). We've heard stories in our area about more fentanyl contamination in other drugs- and those patients are often even younger.
I wonder how much these situations have been impacted by COVID. Did these patients lose their jobs and turn to drinking or drugs? Was the lack of social interaction a precipitating factor for patients that were trying to navigate sobriety, or were at least able to keep their drinking more in check when the world wasn't closed down? I know a few people that relied on AA zoom meetings throughout the past year, but surely there were many people that were cut off from their support system entirely.
I don't think that we will really have a good grasp for many years about the true cost of the pandemic, if we ever do. Deaths like these will never be attributed to COVID directly, but for so many people and so many families, COVID forever altered the future. Have any of you seen a difference in your patient population that you think might be related to the pandemic? Is anyone's place of work pretty much back to where they were in February 2020?
hppygr8ful, ASN, RN, EMT-I
4 Articles; 5,212 Posts
Bravo!!?