State ‘staring down the barrel’ of bad fall, winter
The region’s largest health care provider is already struggling as COVID-19 patients are filling Utah hospitals beyond capacity, but the worst may be yet to come unless more people get vaccinated and wear masks, a doctor on the front lines of battling the deadly virus warned Friday.
“We’re staring down the barrel of potentially a really bad fall and winter without a whole lot of relief unless something changes. So, yeah, I’m worried,” Dr. Eddie Stenehjem, an Intermountain Healthcare infectious diseases physician, told reporters during a virtual news conference.
Children may get more sick from the highly contagious delta variant, Stenehjem said, with cases and hospitalizations among the young increasing nationwide, numbers he believes will keep going up as the new school year gets underway without mask mandates.
“We will see transmission in schools with this incredibly transmissible delta variant. We will see cases go up in children, and some of those children will have severe disease, and those children will end up in our hospitals,” the doctor said, calling for masks in schools.
“I really hope that our communities recognize that masking is the right thing to do at this point in time for children when they go back to school. Children are very good at this,” Stenehjem said, adding there are no documented biological adverse reactions to masking children, although some may not like face coverings.
“But if we want to prevent transmission in our schools, we have to go back to the things that we know that work,” he said, anticipating that once classes resume, not only will more children get COVID-19, they will also spread it to family members, fueling the surge in cases.
An attempt to impose a mask mandate in Salt Lake County schools for children who are too young to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because the shots are approved only for those 12 and older was overturned Thursday by the Salt Lake County Council.
Intermountain Healthcare hospitals hit 102% capacity in intensive care units and about 98% capacity on acute medical and surgical floors as of Thursday, Stenehjem said, as coronavirus cases in Utah reached levels not seen since last winter.
“So we’re full. Completely full. This is not a place where we want to be,” he said, because that means COVID-19 patients have to be moved to make room for those coming in after suffering heart attacks, strokes, serious accidents or other trauma, adding to the strain on caregivers when morale is already at a low point.
“We’ve been in this fight now for over 18 months. We all kind of thought that, ‘Hey, we have this effective vaccine. It’s safe and it’s effective.’ I think I had it in my mind that everybody’s going to get it that can get it and we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Stenehjem said.
Just over 47% of all Utahns are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, meaning it’s been two weeks or more since their final dose. The Utah Department of Health is offering new statistics showing unvaccinated Utahns are around six times more likely to test positive or be hospitalized for the virus — and nearly 11 times more likely to die from it.
“We realize now that COVID is here to stay, and unless we can get our community fully vaccinated, we’re going to be dealing with this for the indefinite future,” Stenehjem said, urging Utahns to get the shots along with wearing masks as “a symbol of safety,” limiting interactions and social distancing to limit the transmission of the virus.
Starting Friday, Intermountain Healthcare has new restrictions on visitors, limiting admitted patients to two visitors every 24 hours rather than two at a time. Adult outpatient surgery patients are allowed only one visitor, while children who’ve had outpatient surgery can have two.
For patients hospitalized with COVID-19, the limit is also one visitor for adults and two for children. Those visitors will need to wear personal protective equipment provided by hospital staff. Intermountain Healthcare is also considering delaying nonemergency procedures.
from Deseret News https://ift.tt/2Xsi4KE
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