ICU Nurse Talks About Treating Patients with Coronavirus, Luke Mulch | Coronavirus Perspective

About this episode

Vance interviews Luke Mulch, an ICU nurse and jiujitsu training partner, for a firsthand account of hospital conditions during the early pandemic. Luke opens by describing his day-to-day ICU role — managing ventilators, vasopressors, sedation, and occasionally physically restraining combative patients (drawing directly on his jiujitsu training in one vivid incident) — before turning to how COVID has reshaped his unit: an entire wing now dedicated to COVID or rule-out-COVID patients, with roughly 80-85% of ventilated patients failing to recover. He describes PPE rationing (reusing single-use N95 masks and face shields, sterilizing and rebagging them) that directly contradicted prior nursing protocol, and the parallel financial strain hospitals faced from canceled elective surgeries, leading to furloughed nurses and cut administrators even as the ICU overflowed. Luke pushes back firmly against skepticism he's encountered, arguing that people dismissing the pandemic as a hoax simply aren't seeing what he sees — patients on ventilators dying at rates far beyond a bad flu season. He shares a long personal story about becoming a nurse after witnessing his daughter's traumatic birth, then reflects candidly on the psychological toll of ICU work (PTSD rates he compares to combat veterans), on decisions around end-of-life care and CPR, and on his own precautions (living in his basement, away from his wife and kids, to avoid bringing the virus home). He closes on a personal, lighter note about missing jiujitsu and using the downtime for home projects, predicting the world will look largely the same in two weeks.

Key moments

• **[00:04:23–00:09:06]** Vivid, physically detailed account of restraining a combative, disoriented cardiac-arrest survivor using jiujitsu technique — a rare direct overlap between the host-guest relationship (training partners) and the clinical content.
• **[00:09:38–00:12:28]** Core COVID clinical data: an entire ICU wing now dedicated to COVID patients, an 80-85% mortality rate among those requiring ventilation, explicitly contradicting "hoax" framing.
• **[00:16:28–00:19:36]** Hospital financial paradox: elective surgeries down, non-ICU nurses furloughed and administrators let go, even as the ICU is overwhelmed — a counterintuitive picture of hospital economics during the pandemic.
• **[00:22:41–00:27:35]** Detailed PPE-rationing account: N95 masks and face shields normally single-use now being sterilized, rebagged, and reused, contradicting standard infection-control training and provoking "outrage from nurses."
• **[00:30:31–00:31:25]** Direct, blunt rebuttal of pandemic skepticism: "you can still sit here and tell me with a straight face that this is some government ploy? I mean, you're insane."
• **[00:39:06–00:44:23]** Extended personal origin story: Luke's decision to become a nurse traced directly to witnessing his daughter's traumatic 52-hour birth and the composure of the nurses present.
• **[00:50:21–00:53:03]** Frank discussion of end-of-life care, decision-making authority, and the reality of CPR/tracheostomy consequences — a rare, unflinching clinical perspective on death and dying.
• **[00:57:12–00:59:04]** Closing "two weeks" prediction: things will look "probably about the same," paired with a personal reflection on using lockdown downtime for home projects since jiujitsu training is unavailable.

Notable quotes

“About 80 to 85% that decline to the point where they need a ventilator don't get off and they end up dying... it's definitely not a hoax.”

“You get one N95... you're putting it in a brown bag, you're keeping it in your locker and you're breaking that bad boy back out.”

“This is where my experience with jiujitsu comes in handy.”