Sepsis

Sepsis is an overused, misunderstood term. It made its way into the lay vernacular a few year back. Problem is most docs don't know its definition or meaning.

It sounds like the 92 yo mother with Covid is just very, very sick and most likely from Covid. People throw the term, sepsis, around too much.

There are essentially three stages of sepsis -

1. Early - constitutional changes and some lab and vital sign changes. But we can't really tell early sepsis from people with the flu. So, it's not very helpful.

2. Sepsis with damage to organs not infected.

3. Septic shock - refractory shock, meaning low blood pressure, which stays low even after the pt is given intravenous fluid.

The current definition covers just the latter 2 stages, because the first stage is too wishy-washy and overlaps too much with any infection.

The concept of sepsis is that the body develops an inflammatory response to the infection, which goes awry and causes low blood pressure and damage to other organs.