A Texas Army veteran died of biliary pancreatitis, an easily treatable disease, last week after waiting 24 hours for an ICU bed to open in the flooded state of COVID, according to CBS This morning. Daniel Wilkinson first went to his local hospital, where emergency physician Hasan Kakli diagnosed him with pancreatitis, telling him he would need immediate treatment, but his medical center was not equipped to perform the procedure. With hospitals full of COVID-19 patients, many calls and hours passed before finding an open bed at a VA hospital in Houston where Wilkinson could be flown by helicopter. But when she arrived, 24 hours after first arriving at her local hospital, her illness was too late to treat. “They couldn’t do the procedure on him because too much time had passed,” his mother said. “[They] he told me that they had seen air pockets in their intestines, which means that they were already beginning to die ”.
“I’ve never lost a patient to this diagnosis,” Kakli told CBS. “We know what to do and we know how to deal with it, and we take them where they need to go. I’m afraid the next patient I see is someone who can’t get where they need to go. “
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