HAMILTON: Williams can feed himself now, but he's still having problems with memory and thinking. WILLIAMS: It took me, like, five or six minutes just to pick that thing up, to get my fingers actually on it and my brain telling my hand to lift it up and, you know, to put it in my mouth. He couldn't drink, so a nurse left him a damp swab to suck on. When Williams first woke up, he had almost no control of his arms and legs, and like most patients on a ventilator, he felt parched pretty much all the time. HAMILTON: Even so, Williams says he's improved a lot, especially since he was overweight and out of shape when he got sick. WILLIAMS: So I need it when I have to wake up in the middle night or something and go to bathroom because, you know, trying to get the feet going again is a little rough. HAMILTON: Also, he still depends on a walker. And so I wear my oxygen on my nose, and I'm still able to travel all over the house. But he's still tethered to an oxygen machine.ĭAVID WILLIAMS: I just wear my - actually, I have, like, a hundred-foot cord. HAMILTON: That was more than two weeks ago, and Williams, who is 54, is home now with his wife. The man is David Williams, a former Marine who spent a week on a ventilator after getting COVID-19, and hospital staff have lined up to give him a big sendoff. JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: At a veterans hospital in Little Rock, Ark., a big man in a wheelchair is gliding toward the exit. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports that the process of recovery can be long and grueling. It's nearly 10 percent for people in their 70s and more than 16 percent for those in their 80s.For someone with a life-threatening case of COVID-19, survival is just the first step. In Lombardy, for instance, the case fatality rate for those in their 60s is nearly 3 percent. But data from both China and Lombardy, Italy, show the fatality rate starts rising for people in their 60s. "But if you look at the vast majority of the people who have serious disease and who will ultimately die, they are in that group that are either elderly and/or have underlying conditions."Įstimates for the case fatality rate for COVID-19 vary depending on the country. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR's 1A show. "Of course, you have outliers - people who are young and otherwise previously healthy who are dying," Dr. Furuya says those kinds of conditions can make it harder for the body to recover from infections. People with other underlying medical conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes or chronic lung disease, have also proved most vulnerable. She says for long-term smokers, it could be even worse because their airways and lungs are more vulnerable. Many of the more serious cases have been in people who are middle-aged and elderly - Furuya notes that our immune system gets weaker as we age. Sylvie Briand, director of the WHO's pandemic and epidemic diseases department, said at a press conference In February. The technology "allows us to save more severe patients," Dr. In extreme cases, they need mechanical ventilation - including the use of a sophisticated technology known as ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), which basically acts as the patient's lungs, adding oxygen to their blood and removing carbon dioxide. And many hospitalized patients require supplemental oxygen. The most severe cases - about 6% of patients - end up in intensive care with multi-organ failure, respiratory failure and septic shock, according to a February report from the WHO. Lack of oxygen can also lead to septic shock. Organs need oxygen to function, right? So when you don't have oxygen there, then your liver dies and your kidney dies," he says. "The lack of oxygen leads to more inflammation, more problems in the body. Goats and Soda MAP: Confirmed Cases Of Wuhan Coronavirusĭel Rio says that these symptoms can also make it harder for the lungs to get oxygen to your blood, potentially triggering a cascade of problems.
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