Yes indeed.
Too many patients are catching COVID in Australian hospitals, doctors say. So why are hospitals rolling back precautions? Quote:Steve Irons' older brother Jim was only supposed to be in hospital for a short while. A retired stockman from Maryborough, Queensland, Jim was diagnosed with leukaemia just before Christmas in 2022. He was flown to Brisbane for testing, then back to Maryborough Hospital, where doctors were putting together a plan for him to be treated at home.
But a patient in the room next door to Jim's had COVID, Steve says, and on January 14 last year, Jim tested positive too. "After four days, when the hospital told me he was no longer infectious, I took the risk and decided to visit him," says Steve, who'd flown up from Tasmania. "I sat with him for three days, playing country music, reading to him."
And then, on Saturday January 21, Jim Irons died of COVID-19 pneumonia and acute myeloid leukaemia, aged 79. It still distresses Steve to know his brother would have lived longer had he not caught a dangerous virus in a place he should have been safe. Once Jim had COVID, he says, hospital staff kept his door closed and donned masks and gowns when they came into his room. But hindsight is 20/20. "For me, to put him next door to a COVID patient caused his death," Steve says. "It didn't have to happen that way. If they'd had a separate COVID ward … with formal routes of entry, cleaning, controlled ventilation, Jim could still be with us now."
Quote:Twelve months later Australian hospitals have become a strange new battleground in the fight against COVID, with doctors and public health experts concerned that too many patients are catching the virus — and an alarming number are dying — as a result of inadequate infection control. Until recently, tools like contact tracing, testing, N95 respirators and good ventilation were mainstays of COVID management in healthcare settings. But in many hospitals they've been wound back or ditched in tandem with other community protections, putting patients and healthcare workers at risk and deterring others from seeking treatment.
Health departments insist the risk of catching COVID cannot be eliminated completely, and that hospitals maintain stringent measures to prevent infections and manage outbreaks. But senior healthcare workers in several states say vulnerable people — including transplant and oncology patients and others with compromised immune systems — are contracting COVID because even basic precautions are not being taken: a consequence, they say, of hospitals' failure to address airborne transmission, and the pervasive myth that COVID is "just a cold".
Quote:Of course, evidence clearly shows
COVID is nothing like a cold, particularly for hospital patients who are at higher risk of severe illness and death. Shocking data released under Freedom of Information laws last year revealed 5,614 people were suspected to have caught COVID in Victorian public hospitals between 2020 and April 2023, with more than one in 10 confirmed or suspected to have died as a result of their infection. In Queensland, similar data shows an average of 13 people caught COVID in hospital every day in the 18 months to June last year, with one patient dying every two days.
Can't wait for the class action lawsuits to start - if they haven't already.
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People are still dying of Covid19 in Australia (Read 57917 times)
