CORONAVIRUS: THE BURGER-FLIPPING TREATMENT

A week ago, there was a video going around of a doctor describing breathing exercises to help people who have caught the coronavirus. The method was to take several breaths, holding each one, then coughing, and then laying down on your stomach for five minutes. By laying on your front, more oxygen can get into your lungs.
Now comes this: Doctors are finding that placing the sickest coronavirus patients on their stomachs helps increase the amount of oxygen that’s getting to their lungs (Duh!). They’ve nicknamed it Burger Flipping. Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, regional director for critical care at Northwell Health, which owns many hospitals in New York, says, “We’re saving lives with this, one hundred percent. It’s such a simple thing to do, and we’ve seen remarkable improvement. We can see it for every single patient.” Where did the idea come from? Seven years ago, French doctors published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that patients with severe respiratory issues who were on ventilators had a lower chance of dying if they were placed on their stomachs in the hospital. Doctors are now seeing that with coronavirus patients. When one patient at Long Island Jewish was placed on his stomach, his oxygen saturation rate, a measure of oxygen in the blood, went from 85% to 98%, a huge jump. The ventilated patients typically stay on their stomachs for about 16 hours a day.
* Uh, no offense, but why has it taken 2 million cases and 125,000 deaths worldwide to figure this out?
* This is great news, except now there’s going to be a shortage of massage tables.
* I hope this isn’t the same Dr. Mangala who did experiments on people in Nazi Germany.
* Burger flipping. Is anybody else hungry now?
* If I get it, flip me on my front, but please for the love of god make sure you tie up my hospital gown in the back.