A woman made a 10-minute video in which she claims that a nurse working on the Coronavirus front lines in New York City told her that some hospitals are "murdering" COVID-19 patients by negligence. The woman further said that some of the New York hospitals are leaving the patients to "rot and die." The video has since gone viral on social media.
The alarming video was shared online and the woman featured as a nurse practitioner. While talking about her nurse friend, the woman said, "For her safety, she cannot come out and say these things, so I am her voice...She wants this to get out."
Are healthcare facilities in New York City killing people?
About 45 seconds in, the woman, identified as Sara, said some of the New York hospitals, "Are killing them [patients]; they are not helping them." The woman even used the word "murder" which she allegedly heard coming from her nurse friend who went to the New York City expecting to help. In addition, the woman in the video said:
Patients are left to rot and die — her words. She has never seen so much neglect. No one cares. They are cold and they don't care anymore. It's the blind leading the blind.
Typical in its monologue, this video does not reveal the names of those hospitals maing it difficult to prove or disprove her claims. But as per New York health professionals, there are a few misleading claims about the Coronavirus care in the New York City, as one of the findings suggest ed that patients are dying because of intentional shoddy care.
Is this video showing the truth of New York healthcare?
Christian Castaneda, whose YouTube name is Christian Lee, a pulmonary- and critical-care fellow at New York-Presbyterian Queens hospital, said in another video, "I've never seen someone so disconnected with actual clinical care" and added, "What this lady is saying is absolutely not true."
Another woman, Rebecca, who is a nurse practitioner working with COVID-19 patients in New York called the video a fake one. "I don't know what happened in one particular hospital, but I can assure you that that is not happening where I work and it's also not happening in the facilities of many, many of my friends and colleagues at other hospitals."
However, in the viral video, it was claimed that hydroxychloroquine alone or with Zithromax, zinc, vitamin C and high doses of vitamins A and D are given to patients. Some researchers found that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine could mitigate some of the symptoms associated with novel Coronavirus, while other research studies failed to find any effect.
As per the most recent study, among the COVID-19 patients who are taken to hospitals, treatment using hydroxychloroquine azithromycin, or both was not associated with a significantly lower death rate. As per a French study, scientists used hydroxychloroquine along with the drug azithromycin on 80 Coronavirus patients and found that the virus was essentially gone in five days. But later the research society announced that the study did not meet its standards.
In terms of using Zinc, there is no clinically proven evidence that it works against the COVID-19, while a research paper published by the National Institutes of Health concluded that high-dose intravenous use of vitamin C "improves the outcome of COVID-19 infection." The paper also noted that in this case more studies of its use for severe COVID-19 infected pneumonia "are definitively warranted."
But doctors in India are reportedly using zinc, vitamin A, C and D, and magnesium sulphate to "possibly reduce viral replication" in hospitalized patients. This viral video also claimed that Coronavirus patients are put on ventilators with high pressure that "causes trauma to the lungs."
Earlier it was revealed that many patients who go under ventilators die and survivors usually face life-long breathing issues, caused either by the machine or the damage done by the virus.
The longer people live under such life support, the more likely they are to suffer complications related to the machine. While considering this fact many intensive care units have started to delay putting a Coronavirus patient under ventilator. It is their last option if a patient's condition gets worse, said Dr Udit Chaddha, an interventional pulmonologist with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
He said, "We let these patients tolerate a little more hypoxia [oxygen deficiency]. We give them more oxygen. We don't intubate them until they are truly in respiratory distress. If you do this correctly, if you put somebody on the ventilator when they need to be put on the ventilator and not prematurely, then the ventilator is the only option."
After it was revealed that New York has reported as many as 80 percent of COVID-19 patients had died after being placed under the ventilation, Dr Hassan Khouli, chair of critical care medicine at Cleveland Clinic explained that these critical patients died because they were so sick from the Coronavirus that they needed life-support, not because the ventilators caused the harm.
