VOLUME IV / ISSUE V / MAY 2020
SPECIAL REPORT
A COMMON MEDICAL DEVICE COULD SAVE YOU FROM COVID-19 A
s both public and private researchers and health organizations begin to learn more about COVID-19, respected physicians and researchers are suggesting many patients are focusing on the wrong symptoms, delaying medical attention and ultimately facing the uncertain availability of a ventilator when their lung capacity is exhausted. For nearly two months, patients have been largely instructed to wait at home until their symptoms – cough, fever and body ache, loss of taste or sense of smell, or difficulty breathing – either improve or worsen, but physicians at the heart of the pandemic are treating patients who waited far too long – based on medical advice. The human body is a remarkable organism, when one part of the organism cannot function at 100%, the body can compensate for extended periods of time. Such is the case of the novel coronavirus. As the virus attacks the
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lungs’ function and capacity, the body overcompensates by breathing harder to offset the incapacity. By the time the body is exhausted from compensating, the weakened immune system simply fails, Drs. Richard Levitan and Michael Marcin contributed to this article. and patients can no longer breathe on their function, which can be inhibited by own. There is a light at the end of the pneumonia. tunnel; however, as leading voices begin to advocate for the use of simOn Monday, the New York Times ple, at-home technology to measure published an opinion piece by Dr. lung function using oxygen saturation Richard Levitan, an emergency physilevels. cian who worked at Bellevue hospital in New York City for 10 days during Anyone who’s been to the doctor’s the height of the crisis in the city. He office, a clinic or hospital should be cited his experience as a physician, familiar with the oximeter – a medical inventor of an imaging system for device slightly larger than a clothespin teaching intubation and his experience that clips onto the finger to measure in the E.R. in New York City. “I heard pulse and, perhaps provincially, oxyfrom a fellow physician that this [the gen levels, offering insight into lung pandemic] would be like nothing I’d