I am relying here on Google translate, so I might miss something.
That mortality in the article is about patients being in ICU, but not every patient in intensive care is intubated.
Actually, to my knowledge, doctors are now avoiding intubation as long as possible, which explains the "increased" mortality rate.
You can see it the other way around, of those people, where they didn't see any other possibility, they still manage to save 1 in 10 with intubation.
Google translate is correct. I was going to make the same comment, the article is talking about ICU patients and does not mention if they were intubated or not. The 175 patients in the study might not have been put on ventilators, the article does not specify!
I think the question was not how many patients that need intubation are in the ICU but how many patients in the ICU need intubation. I think the suggestion is that the first number is 100% while the second is much lower until you hit a point where ICU beds are so full that only to most critical cases are put into the ICU.
Yes, agree that there is a difference. Regarding Sweden, it seems like all patients in ICU are intubated.
An explanation might be that because of the low number of ICU beds in Sweden only people deemed to have a fair chance of survival is admitted.
[1] is the ICU register that gives some statistics, e.g. that median age is 60 years and 25% of patients don't have any risk factor.
As another data point/anecdote, I heard the number 90% from someone working in ICU in Switzerland a few weeks ago.
It certainly wasn't a scientific study, but their point was that basically most people intubated were dying in the end, which was really disheartening.
Eight of ten corona patients survive intensive care
Published Sunday 12 april 17.33
More covid-19 patients are now being discharged from hospital in Stockholm region, and eight out of ten patients survive intensive care.
After having examined the first 175 patients admitted to intensive care with covid-19 at Karolinska University hospital, the conclusion is that 48 out of the 62 patients that were discharged did survive intensive care. The other
14 patients died.
- I am cautiously optimistic as the immediate survival rate seems to be better than what we were expecting when we started doing this, says David Konrad, head doctor at the ICU at Karolinska University hospital in Stockholm.
- We had read accounts and reports from other parts of the world that said perhaps 10-25 percent of the patients admitted to ICU would survive.
- This is a very preliminary result and we don't know what will happen in the longer term. We don't yet know if anything will happen to the discharged patients, or in what state of health they will be. We have treated too few
patients so far to be certain of any of our conclusions, says David Konrad.
The ICU at Karolinska University hospital currently has 126 covid-19 patients and the hospital has a total of 177 ICU beds.
There are 78 remaining ICU beds in all of region Stockholm, and there are about six to twelve covid-19 patients being admitted to ICUs in the region per day. Despite this, David Konrad thinks there are signs of a slowdown in the influx of new patients.
- We have also started to discharge more patients. This indicates that we've reached a plateauing phase where there's a better balance between the number of incoming patients and patients who can leave the ICU, says David Konrad, though he does point out that the situation may change.
The Health Authority has also updated the nationwide statistics today. 899 people have died in association with covid-19 in Sweden, which is an increase of 12 people compared to yesterday.
The government has pointed out that one should be careful to not draw premature conclusions from what's being reported, due to time lag.
In total, 10 483 people have been confirmed infected by the virus in Sweden thus far.
Marcus Admund Funck
marcus.admund_funck@sverigesradio.se
You can see it the other way around, of those people, where they didn't see any other possibility, they still manage to save 1 in 10 with intubation.