Experts' Advice On Caring For A Virus Patient At Home
BLITZER: We're awaiting the start of today's briefing by members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Once it starts, we'll have live coverage. As confirmed cases of the virus are soaring right now, people are facing the challenge of caring for a family member who's sick, but still at home. Brian Todd has been consulting with medical experts to get their advice. What are you hearing, Brian?</s>BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, as you know, a lot of coronavirus patients do not have to go to the hospital. In fact, most of them don't have to and that means a lot of coronavirus patients are at home, isolated and in need of care. That also means that their caregivers find themselves having to learn a whole new set of skills.</s>TODD (voice-over): In New York City, Jessica Lustig says she feels like she's living in a time warp. The deputy editor of "The New York Times" magazine has written a heart-wrenching Journal of what it's like to stay at home and care for her coronavirus, infected husband, who she says is "wearing the same pajama bottoms for days because it is too hard to change out of them". Lustig writes that her husband, who she calls T is isolated in his room, away from their teenage daughter. Lustig says only she goes into T's room to care for him, which public health experts say is the right move.</s>GAVIN MACGREGOR-SKINNER, DIRECTOR OF TRAINING, GLOBAL BIORISK ADVISORY COUNCIL: Keep everyone else away from that rouge (ph). You keep them away from the clothes and their bedding and also their utensils and plates and anything else they've touched. And it's that one person that should be looking at being the care provider and looking after them.</s>TODD (voice-over): But for Jessica Lustig, that means an exhausting and stressful routine. She says she's rushing back and forth, making sure T has a little dinner, just a tiny bowl of soup, just an appetizer really that he is unable to smell, that he fights nausea to choke down, taking his temperature, monitoring his oxygen saturation levels with the fingertip pulse oximeter brought by a friend from the drugstore. Dispensing his meds, washing my hands over and over. She can't leave a bottle of Advil in his room, she says, because she needs to handle that bottle. Anything her husband touches, she says, has to be carefully taken from his room to the kitchen or laundry room where she and her daughter tried to clean it without actually touching it with an exposed hand. Experts say, again, Lustig is following the playbook.</s>MACGREGOR-SKINNER: Ensure that all the utensils, the plates, when you feed them is kept separately and we wash them up separately. Keep their clothes separate, so we put them in the washing machine and do the laundry. We keep those separate.</s>TODD (voice-over): And experts say, home caregivers as well as their patients have to wear masks.</s>MACGREGOR-SKINNER: Put a procedure mask on or they have one next to the bed they put that on when you go into given the food, when you go into giving them the water or you go into give them medication or you're going into help them to go to the bathroom.</s>TODD (voice-over): But frontline doctors say they're worried about home caregivers having everything they need.</s>DR. JENNIFER LEE, EMERGENCY ROOM DOCTOR, GEORGE WASHINGTON HOSPITAL: I have no confidence that they have the personal protective equipment they need to protect themselves and their patients.</s>TODD (voice-over): Home caregivers also have to deal with the emotional anguish of the patients more bizarre symptoms. Lustig writes, "The nights are hardest when the fear and dread descend, T feverish, lying on his back, murmuring hoarsely. Saying he almost just called their daughter CK by the name of his 20-years-ago ex- girlfriend".</s>TODD: And that's what experts say home caregivers also have to address here the issue of taking care of themselves during this ordeal, listening to music, reading, watching TV, anything that makes you happy, those things are so crucial. Also, finding someone else to talk to, someone to whom you can offload all of your anxieties. Wolf?</s>BLITZER: That is all so, so heartbreaking, Brian. And multiply that one case by the thousands all over the country at a date, all over the world right now. You begin to get a sense of what these people are going through right now. The enormity is just so, so awful. Brian Todd reporting, thank you. And as the pandemic clearly is spreading, people have more and more questions. Our own Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he's standing by live. He will answer some of your questions when we come back.