Heid the Ba wrote:Is everyone's favourite Potsdam Hospital on standby?
Sorry for being late. I appreciate the interest.
We are quite a bit away from Potsdam, in the wild countryside just outside the autobahn ring. Our arrangement is that we keep one single room at our (currently unused) intensive care unit stocked and ready for isolation and initial treatment of a single patient (drafting one nurse per shift from the other units). If that patient turned out to be Corona positive, we'd have her or him transferred to Charité University Hospital in Berlin, possibly by heli. Under the regime that obtained until last week - Small of number of cases under easily identifiable epidemiological circumstances - small peripheral hospital were not supposed to treat patients with any relevant symptoms.
If, as seems to be quite possible now, larger number of cases arrive, we'll act according to our general-purpose pandemia plan (designed for any rapidly transmissible disease, primarily influenza), emptying out one unit and putting 8 singles beds there (one bed per room), while discharging home as many unaffected patients as possible. We'll have some circulatory monitoring but no real ICU, being the smallest hopsital anywhere near.
If the epidemic is limited or drawn out, as still seems possible, we might never see a single patient: Only the very sick would be brought to hospital, and those might be in need of proper ICU care. So the really sick patients may just bypass us. OTOH, we have a nursing home and a home for the mentally disabled on site. An outbreak there, with a larger number of cases simply in need of an i.v. drip, fever medication, a liter of oxygen per minute, a bit of physical therapy, and help with going to the loo might quickly make for few busy weeks.