Dr. Catherine O’Neal

Chief medical officer

Our Lady of the Lake, a not-for-profit healthcare ministry in Baton Rouge, La.

ON WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE THE FIRST COVID-19 HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS:

We learned so many lessons. The first and I think the biggest impact for the patient is that we stopped intubating and sedating patients so heavily. In critical care, intubation is a risk and sedation is a risk. But at the beginning of this, there were some articles coming out of Europe that said that’s what we should do, and because it was such an unknown, we did that. It took about a week before sanity hit and we realized that these patients are just like any other patient with sepsis … If you don’t intubate them early, then you don’t have to sedate them and paralyze them, and that equals a shorter length of stay and a lower mortality. We are saving lives today by just applying that medicine that we knew worked, but we thought this virus was so different. And in that respect it’s not.

ON PERSISTENT CHALLENGES:

What hasn’t changed and what we all thought would be a non-issue this far down the road is access to a reliable testing supply. I am still spending too much of my day every day trying to figure out how to get testing, how to get a quick turnaround so we know what you have when you come in the door and we can put you in an appropriate room with appropriate PPE. We recently submitted a paper for publication looking at how much PPE you burn when you have a delay in test results, and it’s extraordinary. If we want to be efficient with our PPE and keep our supply in this country adequate, one of the best ways to do that is have adequate testing, and the fact that we don’t three months later is one of the biggest hindrances to continuing medical care for everybody.