To this layman, it seems that authorities are doing far better at telling us how to avoid the spread of the coronavirus than they are at telling us how to care for ourselves if we think or know we’re infected.
The official coronavirus.gov site has no answers to most self-care questions. Even the site’s page called “Caring for Yourself at Home,” which provides 10 top suggestions to “manage your health,” includes six directives that are not actually aimed at caring for the patient but at stopping him or her from spreading the virus to others.
The other suggestions aren’t much help either because they are so basic as to not really need saying: “Get rest and stay hydrated. … If your symptoms get worse, call your healthcare provider immediately. … For medical emergencies, call 911.” Gee, thanks.
Even on the pages for health professionals, the story is the same: point after point about how to avoid catching the virus in the first place but very little about how to ameliorate its symptoms. Obviously, there’s no cure yet, but surely there are strategies to make it more bearable and less dangerous — right?
I’m not a medical provider, so I don’t have answers, but I think most of us have questions that aren’t being addressed.
For example, what, if anything, should people do to respond to infection or suspected infection while they await test results? (Washing hands is useless if one already is sick!)
If many fatalities or serious complications come from secondary infections, which has been the case with other epidemics and pandemics, is there anything we should do to make those secondary infections less serious or even go away?
What medicines are likely to help at least treat symptoms — to make us feel less bad without doing some other damage to our ability to fight the virus? Expectorants? Cough suppressants? Is aspirin or acetaminophen safe, and for what ages? Ibuprofen? Saline solution?
Are there any dietary suggestions we should particularly abide by? Is there any danger, in general, to herbal cures or teas? Is it better to keep one’s home colder than usual? Warmer?
What about those reports of quicker recoveries in patients treated with anti-malarial drugs? South Korea, which has drawn laudatory notice for better containment of COVID-19 overall, said it found some success (again, not cures but lessened severity) with this approach. If certain patients’ health becomes dire, should they ask doctors if they can try this? Should doctors comply? If so, what is being done to make available greater supplies of those drugs?
Finally, if you do have the coronavirus and you’re quarantined and in touch with health professionals by phone, is there any tipping point at which you should request hospitalization, ventilators, or other more aggressive treatment? Is there a point before which it would be ill-advised?
Fear, confusion, and other psychological distress can worsen the effects of dangerous illnesses. Most people are not temperamentally suited to being told to just “wait something out.” Giving us some purposive suggestions to fight back against our sickness may, at least at the margins, help us recover more quickly —and would certainly help our mental states regardless.
If up to half of the entire population may get infected (even if not drastically ill), then surely, the nation’s authorities should move on from repeating advice about prevention and start telling us how to handle the disease. Right now, they are failing at that task.
