Trying to understand the new presentation of severe COVID-19 in the post vaccination era.
Excerpt from Audio Transcript
Hi, I'm Dr Philip McMillan, and I'm talking today about an important clinical and scientific question that has been floating around in my head for some time.
And the question is, is how will patients with COVID-19 die?
Now, the reason I'm asking that is that in truth, I am expecting similar if not higher numbers of deaths as the virus continues to circulate in highly vaccinated populations.
But I believe the pattern of death is going to change.
The question is what is it and how do you approach it clinically?
In the first wave of the pandemic patients died primarily by respiratory failure. What would happen is that you had the initial inflammation in the lungs, which caused some symptoms, but it's not until the immune phase or the cytokine storm that patients would end up in hospital needing oxygen and then going on intensive care.
The primary reason for that was partially about the lung inflammation…
