Urgent Need to Address the Immense Suffering Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic Surge: Subcutaneous Route to the Rescue!

Abstract

The worst thing we can do is abandon someone who is hurting. Attitudes which promote death rather than affirm life are the ultimate abandonment. ' -Dame Cicely Saunders. The second wave surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in India has presented a challenge to urgently mitigate the immense suffering. The rapid spread due to the variant, airborne transmission, and flaunting of prevention guidelines has resulted in fear and panic. The rapid deterioration in severe COVID infection results in total suffering, which is physical, emotional, social, financial, and spiritual for both the person and family. Compounding this is the overwhelmed health-care system resulting in a lack of vaccinations, oxygen, hospital and ICU beds. All these lead to despair, anguish, and hopelessness. How can we mitigate this immense suffering? There is a need for a more effective integration of palliative care with COVID care at all levels. A recent BMJ article outlines palliative care for patients with serious COVID-19. [1] This integration must result in a better quality of life and recovery as the immediate goal and also better quality of death if it is inevitable. This is wartime and the need of the hour is for all palliative care teams to prioritise this need and be involved in effective palliative care integration with COVID care, in addition to their primary area of responsibility. In the context of severe COVID infection, the acute shortages of hospital and ICU beds can only be addressed by making the bed at home functional. Desperate families need to be supported and empowered to take care of their loved ones at home by both COVID care and palliative care joining hands and adhering strictly to all personal protection measures. This can be done by effective use of the subcutaneous route (SC) for symptom control coupled with simultaneous ongoing specialist COVID care support including oxygen provision as possible.https://jpalliativecare.com/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, transform, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.