A UCSF medical doctor is tweeting daily updates detailing life inside the university hospital system during this coronavirus pandemic.
Robert Wachter, chair of the school’s Department of Medicine, is posting updates using his personal twitter handle.
California has mandated that most people stay at home in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed by an influx of patients who are all sick at once. What happens inside major systems like UCSF’s in the coming weeks could determine how long Californians will need to shelter in place. Wachter’s tweets provide an inside look at the frontlines of the fight against the coronavirus.
“Everybody with cough/flu symptoms feels like they have COVID,” he writes. “Yet our positive test rate (we’re testing only patients with symptoms) is just 3-5% – meaning most (patients) don’t have it.”
In another tweet, he writes, “PPE (personal protective equipment) dire, limiting MDs seeing pts (patients) to one (& subbing inpt televisits), no pt visitors, reusing PPE if safe.”
Wachter also writes the hospital is doing about 80 tests per day and is hoping to increase that number to 1,000.
Here’s Wachter’s thread from Thursday, March 19, below. You can also read it on Thread Reader. You can read his Day One thread here.