The University of Kansas Health System is treating a total of 28 COVID patients today, 27 yesterday. Other significant numbers:
- 15 with the active virus today, 12 yesterday
- 3 in ICU, 5 yesterday
- 0 on a ventilator, 0 yesterday
Key points from today’s guests:
Euna Blythe, car crash survivor
- In November of 2021, she and her husband were driving on the highway and hit a cow, which cause Euna to be life-flighted to the hospital with severe head trauma.
- Her injuries were so severe she underwent multiple surgeries and procedures to save her. Every bone in her face was broken and she spent eight days in a coma and 23 days total in the hospital.
- She continues to rehab, seeing a physical therapist once a week, and is grateful for her family, friends and medical team that have helped in her journey to recovery.
Dr. Dennis Allin, emergency medicine physician, The University of Kansas Health System
- In cases where there are multiple trauma patients, we have to divide our team and we will bring in extra team members if that's needed.
- We probably don't go five nights without something that's more than one victim coming in. We have designed the emergency department to be prepared for multiple trauma patients.
- Being a Level 1 trauma center means we have those resources to handle those patients in the community with severe trauma.
Dr. Stepheny Berry, trauma surgeon, The University of Kansas Health System
- When we’re notified on an incoming trauma patient, we activate the trauma team and we gather as a multidisciplinary team -- the surgery department, the emergency medicine department, anesthesia colleagues, and a specialized set of nurses all assemble in the emergency department to make sure that we're ready to care for this patient upon arrival.
- It’s an organized dance of making sure that we're prioritizing the things that will be most life threatening.
- We go through a specific algorithm of assessing breathing and bleeding to get the patient stabilized.
- Depending on the injury, those patients may need to go to the operating room, they may need to go to the interventional radiology suite, they may go directly to the surgical ICU. So there are a lot of different places that the patients may go based on whatever their injury pattern is.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of infection prevention and control, The University of Kansas Health System
- Recent news reports show that a study about the safety of COVID vaccines was altered by Florida’s Surgeon General.
- If the conclusion of that statement and the study about cardiac risk were true, it certainly would have been a huge revelation, but these records actually show how science is not done.
- When you go through this study, they originally concluded no increased risk of death after the vaccination. And then the subsequent drafts had changes that didn’t really seem like they were peer reviewed.
- We know that various other studies like a peer reviewed one in the New England Journal of Medicine just recently, shows absolutely no increased cardiovascular events from vaccination.
Monday, May 1 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. An avid biker learns hours in the sun have taken a toll. Aggressive skin cancer spread to Mark Morgan's lymph nodes. We’ll show you the treatment that turned a poor prognosis into survival.
Plus, we'll test your sunscreen knowledge.
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