Published in:
01-10-2020 | Stroke | Viewpoint
Low-Intensity Monitoring After Stroke Thrombolysis During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors:
Roland Faigle, Brenda Johnson, Debbie Summers, Pooja Khatri, Craig S. Anderson, Victor C. Urrutia, for the OPTIMISTmain Steering Committee
Published in:
Neurocritical Care
|
Issue 2/2020
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Excerpt
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 poses an unprecedented challenge to health-care systems all across the USA and around the world. Supply and equipment shortages are already a daunting reality in many hospitals and imminent for others. Over the coming months, the projected intensive care unit (ICU) bed capacity gap in the USA ranges from 90,000 to 300,000, depending on infection rates and the success of social distancing and other measures to ‘flatten the curve’ [
1,
2]. This is in excess of
all available ICU beds, including those typically allocated to critically ill patients with stroke and other neurological diseases. In addition to material and equipment shortages, health-care personnel are becoming increasingly stretched as the pandemic continues, with neurology providers and nurses being repurposed or re-assigned, and others temporarily dropping out of the work-force for illness, self-isolation after exposure, or after becoming infected themselves. …
