COVID-19 Treatment Paradigm Concerns

Nine days ago, I opened an intensive care unit to care

for the sickest COVID

positive patients in the city. In these nine days,

I have seen things I have

never seen before. In treating these patients,

I have witnessed medical

phenomenon that just don't make sense in the context of treating a

disease that is supposed to be a viral pneumonia.

Nine days ago, I presumed I was opening an intensive care unit to

treat patients

with a virus causing a pneumonia that was ravaging lungs across the

world, starting out as something mild, a cough, a

sore throat, and progressively increasing in severity

until

ultimately ending in something called acute respiratory distress syndrome,

or ARDS. This is the paradigm that every

hospital in the country is working under.

This is the disease, ARDS, that every hospital is

preparing to treat, and this is the disease, ARDS, for which

in the next two to six weeks a hundred thousand Americans might be put on a

ventilator. And yet, everything I have seen in the last nine

days,

all the things that just don't make sense, the patients I'm seeing in front of me,

the lungs I'm trying to improve, have led me to believe that

COVID-19 is not this disease, and that we are operating under

a medical paradigm that is untrue.

In short, I believe we are treating the wrong disease,

and I fear that this

misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm to a great

number of

people in a very short time