Are we overlooking bacterial infections as a source of death?

[Kokeshi123]

www.cebm.net/covid-19/rapidly-managing-pneumonia-in-older-people-during-a-pandemic/?fbclid=IwAR0T-7dPzxRRG9xylgNUdOtXFNjsohSqv0RIIZrqbYnbswpo0oVgM7GP6J0

Couple of things that stand out:

Coronavirus causes inflammatory damage in the lungs, preventing clearance of bacteria.

Secondary bacterial infection worsens prognosis. Most deaths in the influenza pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968 were caused by secondary bacterial infections (I had no idea about this--this is very interesting!).

Concurrent bacterial pneumonia was highlighted as a particular problem in elderly people in the 2003 SARS outbreak.

Perhaps we all need to asking questions about hospital hygiene and overuse of antibiotics in the past few decades. It's already being speculated in a lot of quarters that Italy's unusually high death rates were partly due to the fact that Italy is the worst in Europe when it comes to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

There is also talk that fatalities in Japan have in part been unexpectedly low due to universal vaccination against pneumococcal pneumonia in the elderly. I have heard some rumors that the strain of TB vaccination that is given in East Asia may be connected with low death rates in many of these countries.

Considering that sepsis is the uks second biggest killer and is often linked to respiratory diseases, i think that although the numbers who have died from having caught Covid 19, was this their final cause of death or was it sepsis?. My dd caught strep A bacterial pneumonia, that was not her cause of death, sepsis was.

It has always been common for fragile and elderly people to die of bacterial pneumonia, in the past it was known as 'old man's friend' because people died relatively painlessly, often just going off in their sleep at a time when life had become unbearable. In our day, antibiotics have cured many patients who would otherwise have died and it's not always a good thing.

However the coronavirus makes everything more difficult, it's unpleasant and people who might have recovered from a bacterial infection are now less likely to, especially the frail and elderly. Many in their early seventies who were otherwise well have died and younger people. This is why we have to be so careful.

I can't say I've ever been overly careful about my health but now that I am seventy and was recovering from an accident which made me sedentary already, though nothing wrong with me on tests and I was getting better each day, I am self isolating and extra careful. Nothing is foolproof of course but, apart from me, I don't want to be infecting or inconveniencing anyone else.

@Phillipa12 sorry for your loss

OP the answer is no, well at least for the medical profession.

The extremely vulnerable group are people whose primary condition is an impaired immune system or they are immunocompromised due to other medical treatment e.g. cancer, organ transplantation. We can't fight bacterial infections properly at the best of times let alone if we get a virus.

Some people in the group take prophylactic antibiotics while others only take them when they get an infection.