Full hospitals and transformed health centers for COVID-19 patients - unfortunately, this is a picture of a new wave of the pandemic in Kazakhstan. A COVID-19 hospital was opened at the National Research Institute for Traumatology and Orthopedics at the end of March. There are currently 12 patients in the intensive care unit on ventilators. The youngest is 30 years old and the oldest is 84 years old. Approximately one in 10 people on ventilators dies, despite all the efforts of the medical staff. Although to date, more than a thousand patients have been cured of coronavirus there, the workload has not decreased, doctors admit.
“Some stay at home until the situation gets critical, others think that they will be able to recover without professional help. What happens in the end? Patients come to us with 40 percent saturation, unconscious, and how should we treat them? We have to work the hardest to fight the disease. There are fresh patients and the ones who have been battling the infection for a long time. The patient is in intensive care for at least two weeks. The average stay in our intensive care unit is 21 days. The maximum period with a positive outcome is 50 days. The main problem of this summer pandemic is that there are so many patients, so many outside contacts and no social discipline,” said Pavel Ostanin, Head of Intensive Care Unit at the National Research Institute for Traumatology and Orthopedics.
Doctors say that the symptoms have also changed. Whereas previously mainly the lungs were affected, now about a third of the patients suffer from pains in gastrointestinal tract, nervous system and joints. It also complicates the course of the disease. Patients are becoming more difficult to treat, and more specialists have to be involved. Doctors once again urge Kazakh citizens not to ignore safety measures and get vaccinated.
Translation by Assem Zhanmukhanova
Editing by Galiya Khassenkhanova
