A doctor speaks about intensive care with COVID-19

As part of our study about patient and family members’ experiences of intensive care and Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. We spoke to an intensive care doctor who treated Covid-19 patients throughout.

In this introduction, intensive care doctor Rupert Pearse explains:

  • What Covid-19 is and what has been learned about the disease since the start of the pandemic
  • Why some patients with Covid-19 need care in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and what treatments they are offered
  • How treating Covid-19 patients in the first waves of the pandemic was different to treating patients before the pandemic
  • The role of family members on ICU, and how their absence during the first waves of the pandemic affected the care doctors and nurses could give to their patients
  • How ICU staff stay involved in the care for their patients after their discharge from ICU and hospital
  • What a patient who is admitted to ICU with Covid-19 can expect

What is Covid and what developments have there been in it’s treatment since the beginning of the pandemic?

So Covid-19 is a disease caused by a virus called SARS-CoV2 and the main problem that SARS-CoV2 causes in our patients is a respiratory disease and in particular inflammation of the lungs. So, most people who have Covid-19 have a very, very, mild form of the disease that's not a lot worse than a bad case of flu, but a small proportion of patients get very severe Covid-19. And that can result in very severe breathing difficulties, low blood oxygen levels, and other problems as well.

The main learning around Covid-19 during the course of the pandemic has been helped by the fact that we have had such huge numbers of patients with an almost identical disease. Before the pandemic, I would see maybe two or three cases of viral pneumonitis a year as an intensive care doctor, and of course, during the pandemic we saw hundreds within a matter of weeks. And that allowed us to really understand the patterns of the disease and distinguish those from the patterns of differences between patients. And that in turn has allowed us to develop a lot of new treatments for Covid-19, many of which have been very effective in saving lives.

Embed Print Transcript