LONDON (AP) — Nine leading European university hospitals are warning they will run out of essential medicines needed for COVID-19 patients in intensive care in less than two weeks as they are increasingly crushed by the pandemic.
The European University Hospital Alliance said that without countries cooperating to ensure a steady supply of these drugs, doctors and nurses might no longer be able to provide adequate intensive care for people critically ill with the new coronavirus.
In a statement published this week and sent to national governments, the group said that aside from the need for protective gear and ventilators, “the most urgent need now is for the drugs that are necessary for intensive care patients.” They wrote that existing stocks of muscle relaxants, sedatives and painkillers were likely to run out in two days in the hardest-hit hospitals, and in two weeks in others.
The shortage has led some hospitals to buy alternative drugs or try other doses on patients.
“It is extremely worrying that overworked and often less-experienced nurses and doctors-in-training, drafted to fill the gaps, have to use products and dosages that they are not used to,” the group wrote, on behalf of hospitals in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Spain.
The hospital group noted that some governments had reacted to the shortages by refusing to export drugs elsewhere, and warned this would prevent drugs from reaching hospitals in dire need of the medicines.
“No single country in Europe has the production facilities to provide all the drugs (or protective gear or ventilators) needed,” they wrote. “Coordinated European action will be of vital importance.”
The world is a three ring shitshow.
Our huckster just happens to be presenting the greatest shitshow on earth.
Unfettered globalization (with most of the world reliant on China for medicines and PPE)…maybe not the best idea now? Sorry Thomas Friedman.
I hope the US learns from this and we bring production back of what are now clearly critical PPE products. Time to retool, USA.
I believe that globalism will change in the aftermath of this crisis. The reasons to distribute production facilities around the globe, rather than concentrating production where wages are less, become many when the production of life-saving medicines is disrupted.
Similarly, unfettered capitalism that literally chooses winners and losers (or more appropriately: living and dead) based on the ability to pay the highest prices deserves a reckoning. That people die because they live in a poor state that completes with wealthy ones and the federal government for resources is an affront to humanity.
I don’t believe that at all. Quarterly earnings reports will still run the show.
I’d like to think that would happen. Just because Apple could make an iPhone in the US and sell for profit at the same price doesn’t mean “The Markets” will let them.
I also don’t see China giving up the power it now has over the entire world’s economy. Maybe they are making bold moves in the South China Sea and sowing dissent within EU member states to further ensure that they hold all the cards.