Greek Prime Minister called “internet underworld” media that recently revealed that half of Covid-19 deaths take place in normal hospital wards and not in Intensive Care Units. In full support of the PM, professor for Infectious Diseases Sotiris Tsiodras even spoke of “quality transition to death” if a patient is not intubated.
Speaking at a live press conference on Thursday and while announcing a 3-week lockdown across the country, Mitsotakis said:
“I saw circulating in the internet underworld that patients do not die in ICUs but in wards. Many times the families themselves choose to intubate patients with a foreseeable death.”
He added that he is describing “different cases than those in Italy” where doctors choose according to the so-called triage scheme. “This will not happen in Greece. The measures will pay off,” Mitsotakis underlined.
Who is the internet underworld, the PM spoke about? Not some random post on Facebook or some claim on Twitter.
It was reputable newspaper To Vima that revealed beginning of the week that 51% of the Covid-19 patients die outside the ICUs.
Citing official documents, to vima wrote that although there are available ICU beds a significantly big number of OCVI-patient remain outside the ICUs even though their health condition is deteriorating.
“State officials and epidemiologists note that in some cases the choice to not trasnfer Covid-patients to ICU depends on other underlying issues they have, something that makes this trasnfer from problematic to vain.”
The 11-page document refers to the period October 19-25. Of the 63 people with average age 82 who died “31(49.21%) were intubated in ICUs and 32 (50.79%) were in clinic wards outside ICUs.”
