Intensive care units are mainly seeing “younger people” as a top consultant warns that no one is immune from the coronavirus.
Dr Tom Ryan, an ICU consultant at St James’s Hospital in Dublin said patients from all age groups are under critical care while battling the disease.
He said there continues to be “a steady flow” of new patients in ICU at the hospital and they have yet to witness “a surge” in critical care units.
But warned that doctors are seeing people in their “30s, 40s, 50s and 60s..all age groups” ending up in ICU.
He said: “In ICU mainly we are seeing younger people.
“Nobody really is immune from this, so everybody has to be concerned about controlling this epidemic for their own sake and for society at large’s sake, but there is a broad mix of patients from every walk of life has ended up in ICU.
“I suspect the surge hasn’t happened because the population at large has been responsible and kept their distance from each other and because people have stayed at home and behaved themselves.”
The top consultant said 20 out of 100 patients in hospital with Covid-19 would be in ICU and could be there for up to three weeks.
He said: “Most of them would be mechanically ventilated.”
Dr Ryan said being on a ventilator is “no trivial event” and spending a week in ICU “takes its toll on any person, no matter how healthy they were beforehand.”
He said doctors would be “reluctant” to refer a patient to ICU if they are a resident in a nursing home and said that decision is made by medical teams and the family of the patient.
The critical care consultant said the medical team looks at every person as an individual when making those decisions.
He told RTE’s This Week: “We’d always want to be sure that a person has a reasonable prospect of returning to a fairly robust vibrant life afterwards.
“If an elderly, frail person didn’t have any chance of surviving, the last thing we would want to do is to subject them to a treatment that would be intrusive and evasive and sometimes undignified if they weren’t going to get any benefit from it.
“It’d be the doctors who would be in ICU and it’d be family members and the broader medical and nursing community and there would be a consensual approach to this.”
