She's saying that the NY hospital put people on ventilators too early and often. That's the gist of the problem. Obviously HCQ is not for late-stage treatment, but the point is that the NY hospital would just put someone on a ventilator as soon as breathing levels took just a slight dip below the normal levels. A good chunk of the video focused on a 37-year old who didn't test positive for COVID and just came in with slightly below normal breathing. He was completely healthy otherwise. She felt he just had anxiety, but the doctors quickly put him on a ventilator, kept turning up the pressure and he died.
Also, it was my mistake in my earlier summary to leave out that she wasn't just talking about HCQ. She said the doctors should be using the less dangerous breathing mask (forgot exactly what it was called) instead of ventilators, but too often the doctors would just skip that.
And as others mentioned, some of the other main issues is that they put positively tested and negatively tested COVID patients together. Or even if they were separated, the negatively tested would still get infected due to poor hygiene from the nurses not changing their outfits. She said it seemed like they wanted these people to be infected to justify the COVID treatment they had already started them on. And lastly, the doctors admitted that no one was surviving once put on a ventilator, and yet they had zero interest in looking into alternative treatments that showed promise around the world.
OK, watched it. A huge waste of my day off, TBH.
Few things that seem off.
1) People are not getting intubated for "anxiety".
2) She is clicking on positive COVID19 lab test results and claiming that they're actually "negative" because the EMR (electronic medical record) displays "Not detected" when she scrolls over to see the units. Thats because...there are no units. Its either positive or negative. It's a quirk of the EMR, it does not mean the virus was not detected. The "non-COVID" patient she filmed in a supposedly COVID area had COVID. She just didn't know how to use the medical record system.
3) Residents are graduated MDs who are in speciality training. While they are still learning, they work under supervision and their preceptors are liable for their mistakes. It is normal for residents to "practice" skills on patients - that is how medical education works.
4) Not sure what her interview with the doctor about the rapid test is supposed to prove - unless the doctor is the medical microbiologist, he would not have any more insight than her as to why they are not using the rapid test in that hospital.
5) Her "caught on tape" discussions do very little to illuminate the medical decisions that she is criticising. We don't know why the patient with high blood sugars was intubated, but it sounds more like it was for airway protection for altered mental status than any respiratory illness. With regards to the 37 year old man, decisions re: futile care are exceedingly difficult and complex, and often involve extensive family discussion and counselling. She presented an extremely superficial overview, with no mention of family discussions, how long he had been ill for, his chances of recovery, or even his current medical status. She also misframed the argument occurring amongst nursing staff, as their issue was the lack of an order and not the DNR itself.
6) A COVID patient on a non rebreather mask or high flow cannula is not "fine", but she repeatedly tries to present them as such to make it look like these people were being vented for no reason. The reason that hospitals skip these is because experience early in the pandemic showed that these patients would deteriorate rapidly, leading to emergency intubations that would be more traumatic and have a higher risk of spreading the infection to health care providers.
7) She's comparing mortality rates between her home hospital and the NYC hospital, but her evidence is purely anecdotal and its clear that she worked in very different departments between the two. It appears she worked in ambulatory setting in Florida ("we only had one patient that was admitted" "I worked in the COVID tent") versus the ICU in NYC. It goes without saying that the mortality rate would be higher in the ICU.
8) Ventilators are not treatment. They should never be seen as such. They are life support for the most ill people. To frame them as a treatment for COVID19 is very dangerous and likely disingenuous on her part.
9) I highly doubt vented patients are a money maker . ARDS patients are intubated for weeks and are extremely expensive to look after.
10) Doctors are not gods. They can't write orders for any medication you read about on the internet. Even if I wrote an order for a Vitamin C infusion, it would get flagged by the hospital pharmacy and would not be dispensed. Heck, I doubt we even carry intravenous vitamin C.
11) She straight up accuses people of being murderers in her last clip, with nothing to substantiate her accusation. People in the ICU often die suddenly - it does not make their death suspicious.