The great anxiety of the government and the officials of the Ministry of Health is not how many will get sick from coronavirus. Based on the experience of foreign countries, mathematical models and estimates, we know that a significant part of the population will at some point be infected with the new type of flu.
What they are afraid of is that they will not all get sick at the same time and that hundreds of beds in Intensive Care Units will be required, because they simply do not exist.
It is time for the health system to collapse and doctors may find it difficult to make the fateful decision of who will live and who will die, as is the case in neighboring Italy, which records millions of deaths from Covid-19.
"We choose who will live and who will die"
As the Greek doctor, Giorgos Giorgos, points out, of the state-of-the-art "Pope Giovanni XXIII" hospital in Bergamo, 40 kilometers outside of Milan, "my colleagues and I have replaced God. I apologize but what I am saying is not a curse. This is how I feel. Within seconds we have to decide who will live and who will die. We enter the ward and we have to decide who lives and who dies after previously finding out that the patient "arrived" and can not go back.
Because the situation in Italy escaped
Why did the Italy and especially its northern part, which for centuries is considered the most well-off and richest in relation to the poorer south? Because, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of people fell ill at the same time, as no serious measures had been taken in time. In the region of Lombardy and Piedmont, for example, in northern Italy, there are 50 hospitals that are considered among the best in Europe, if not the world.
The number of intubated people exceeds 3.000 and all the Intensive Care Units are full, as a result of which people are stacked with mechanical support even in simple rooms with what this means for the health of the patient. The corridors are now full but they still do not reach, which is why we have so many deaths there every day. If the same thing happens in our country, we will be talking about a real disaster.
The next days are crucial
What 's going on Greece; At the moment the number of dead and intubated due to the coronavirus is relatively small but in the coming weeks we expect an eruption as there are people who carry the virus but have not yet seen it. It is incubated in the body of the carriers and will appear within the next fortnight - usually the symptoms appear on the fifth day from the moment you get the germ.
The more the patients spread in the long run, the better, so that we can have beds available in the Intensive Care Units. If the spread escapes, we lose the game, so we should all stay in our homes as recommended by experts in order not to spread the coronavirus. After all, most who will be infected will pass it like a simple cold. However, about 20% will need to be hospitalized and 5% of them in the ICU.
What is happening with ICUs right now
Across the country there are currently around 550 multifunctional ICU beds in public hospitals, half of which are in Attica. They can even increase by 250 to 300 if all ICUs or ICU type are utilized. So, let's go to 800 to 1.100. However, less than half of them can be allocated to the coronavirus. The rest serve other patients and the injured (eg from car accidents, heart attacks, the common flu, etc.).
"It is enough to think that the beds were not enough to cover the needs that already existed before the coronavirus pandemic", as the president of the Federation of Greek Hospital Doctors Associations (OENGE), Aphrodite Retziou, points out meaningfully. Even if all the ICUs of the private hospitals are accelerated, the problem will not be solved, it will just be reduced a little.
Intensive beds next to each other
Finally, the bad thing is that several beds of Intensive Care Units are located in the same room, next to each other, so they can not serve coronavirus cases. As the president of the Panhellenic Federation of Public Hospital Workers (POEDIN), Michalis Giannakos, characteristically points out, "our 53-year-old colleague from Kastoria who was intubated and then ended up, could not be transferred to an ICU bed and so it would stick to the rest. So, he was transferred to AHEPA in Thessaloniki ".
In conclusion, so as not to collapse Health System we should gnaw on time and not make many sick together. But to do this, we know the solution and we will say it again: We stay home!