I’ve never really understood how these places, which naturally bring in the sick and unwell by the thousands every single day, eliminate all or any airborne pathogens, viruses that spread via contact with surfaces, or by a patient coughing or sneezing. It’s not like they lock down the whole facility and sanitize it top to bottom every time a new patient comes in, so how come these places don’t become massive hubs for the spread of disease? How are waiting rooms not considered one of the most dangerous places for transmission in the world? What steps are these doctors and professionals in the field taking to ensure that these people who are coming in sick, aren’t making everyone else in the building sick as well?
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All reputable hospitals have infection control departments that work to keep diseases from spreading among their patients. They don’t always get it right, for example advocating against high flow oxygen versus the closed loops of ventilators early in the Covid pandemic.
In general if you don’t absolutely need to be in a hospital, you should avoid it. In big referral hospitals especially, you have a significant chance of acquiring a disease you didn’t have going in—numbers run as high as 1/3 of people on long-term hospitalization get a “nosocomial infection”. Overall in the US, 5% of patients get one. (That’s an incidence rate.) The prevalence is that 1 out of 31 current hospital patients (2019 study), on average, had an infection they acquired in the hospital. https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/health-care-associated-infections
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