INDIANAPOLIS–Coronavirus is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. That was the sentiment from Louis Profeta, an emergency physician at St. Vincent Hospital of Indianapolis.

“It doesn’t behave like normal infections. We’ll have patients that come in and their oxygen levels will be low. They’ll be a little short of breath, but they don’t really look that bad. Then an hour later, they are in full respiratory failure. Their longs are full of fluid. They’re suffocating. Then we have to put them on a ventilator,” Profeta said in an interview Wednesday morning.

 

Profeta says there have been some patients showing some kinds of “clotting issues” related to the coronavirus.

“It is so bizarre that none of us can get our hands around all of the different complications of it and we need to respect it,” Profeta said.

Despite that, Profeta says central Indiana and the rest of the state has handled the challenge pretty well.

“Our budget has been good. We got extra income to address some of these healthcare issues. Our stockpiles are fairly good. Our ICU at St. Vincent is filled. Our morgue is filled. But our secondary ICU and our surge capacity is there. We still have plenty of ability to expand and plenty of ventilators,” Profeta continued.

Profeta says there are also too many regulations in the healthcare industry.

“If you go to the different social media sites involving ER physician groups, it’s incredible how many administrators out there are paying more attention to what’s being posted in terms of selfies and Facebook posts from their physicians and nurses than they are to N95 masks. The amount of time they spend policing whether we have a lid on our coffee cup at the nurse’s station would have been better spent had they been paying attention to the stockpile of N95 masks,” says Profeta.

When asked if U.S. medical experts had been deceitful in the information they have been giving out. Profeta says, if anything, the real liars are China.

“China was lying to us. They were taking the data they had from China early on. We were fundamentally deceived by a country that was experiencing this from the onset. We have to do some soul searching from this point on in regards to China,” says Profeta.