Coronavirus updates: leading doctor warns that intensive care units are caring for ‘younger people’

Intensive care units (ICUs) are primarily seeing “younger people” as a senior consultant cautions that no one is immune to the coronavirus.

Dr. Tom Ryan, an ICU consultant at St James Hospital in Dublin, said that patients of all age groups are in critical care while fighting the disease.

He said there is still “a steady flow” of new ICU patients in the hospital and that they have not yet seen “an increase” in critical care units.

But he cautioned that doctors are seeing people in their “30s, 40s, 50s and 60s … all age groups” who end up in the ICU.

He said: “In the ICU we are mainly seeing younger people.

“No one is really immune to this, so everyone should be concerned with controlling this epidemic for their own good and for the good of society in general, but there is a wide mix of patients from all walks of life who have ended up in the ICU.

“I suspect that the increase has not happened because the general population has been responsible and kept away from each other and because people have stayed home and behaved well.”

The lead consultant said 20 out of 100 patients in the hospital with Covid-19 would be in the ICU and could be there for up to three weeks.

He said, “Most of them would be mechanically ventilated.”

Dr. Ryan said being on a ventilator is “not a trivial event” and spending a week in the ICU “affects anyone, no matter how healthy they are beforehand.”

He said doctors would be “reluctant” to refer a patient to the ICU if they reside in a nursing home, and said the decision is made by the medical teams and the patient’s family.

The critical care consultant said that the medical team considers each person as an individual when making those decisions.

He told RTE This Week: “We always want to make sure that a person has a reasonable prospect of going back to a fairly solid vibrant life afterwards.

“If an elderly and frail person had no chance of survival, the last thing we would want to do is subject them to treatment that would be intrusive and evasive and sometimes unworthy if they did not gain any benefit from it.

“It would be the doctors who would be in the ICU and it would be the family members and the medical and nursing community in general and there would be a consensual approach to this.”