State of Our Health System: Current COVID-19 Situation

well hello there um my name is matthew perry i'm the ceo at the genesis healthcare system and today i have with me uh dr scott wagner our chief medical officer uh and together we wanted to share some news with you and information about kind of where we are in our community right now with with covid so as you can as you probably know um we are seeing where we have a lot of the the delta virus in our community and it is it has spread very quickly uh and uh our current situation at the hospital is that we have about 75 coveted patients in in the hospital and it is putting a tremendous strain on our ability to be able to care for everybody who needs care in our community you see the dr bregner and i were wearing masks we have this we have this partition in between us everybody at genesis has been for the last year and a half have been wearing masks and um and i wanted to ask dr wegner to to maybe comment uh on that at some point kind of the outcome of that but maybe dreading if you could start off with describing kind of where we're at with uh clinically sure now i think first it's important to address um that we are trying to be honest and transparent with what we say so i've been a cancer physician for about 30 years and 30 years ago i was making decisions for my patients with breast cancer for example and i was absolutely confident i was making the right decisions with the information available at that time when i look back at those decisions from today's lens i realized that many of the choices i made were wrong and we're experiencing the same thing with covid we've had 18 months to learn everything that we know about this situation each day we've tried to make decisions for our patients and our community based on the information that we had available and in some cases we've missed the mark and when we look back we wish we would have decided something different but we didn't have the available information i think sometimes that gets translated into well somehow we were lying about what we were saying but i can assure you that we've tried to make the best decision daily with what we know today in our health system as matt mentioned we have about 75 inpatients 15 of whom are on ventilators we've had many days in the past few weeks when we haven't been able to see everybody who's presented to our emergency department because there hasn't been a bed available or staff available additionally as i speak we have 60 employees who are positive for cobit and another 40 who are on quarantine which is putting a big big strain on our ability to care for folks last week i was in a situation that i've never been in in 33 years as a physician we had five patients who needed emergency coronary bypass surgery and no beds to treat them we actually had to sit and think which patient is most likely to die and that patient will be first on our list we tried to transfer patients to other hospitals in the region but every hospital that we could refer a patient to had more than 100 people on a waiting list to be uh admitted we were able to operate on the most sick patient uh almost right away we transferred another one of the five and the other three are in the hospital safely waiting for their surgery but i never thought in my whole career that i'd be in a situation where we had to think about rationing care for people that needed it today and i'm fearful that if we don't do something different we'll be in that situation daily here at genesis yeah and and so one of the things that is it's just that we know that um there's a lot of confusion out there there's a lot of data and information that uh you know people are sharing uh and what we one of the things that we wanted that we wanted to share some some facts that that we know from our experience um as dr regner said you know this this our knowledge of covet has has evolved tremendously over the last 18 months as the world has learned what works and what doesn't in the form of treatment and prevention so one of the things that you see you're going to see a graph just comes up i wanted to share with you and i want to specifically talk about the children we all know and i think everybody in our community is agreement on one thing is we want to have our kids in school and you know kids have been have been harmed immensely over this last year and year and a half because they haven't had an in-person education so what we wanted to share is what's is what's happening in the school systems today our kids are back in school but a lot of them are being put out on quarantine so in this in the graph that's up in front of you here right now you'll see these are all of the positive cases uh in in muskingum county now the counties around us i look very similar to this by month and by age group and i'm going to really focus on let's start over on the left-hand side in july and i'm really focused just on the 0 to 19 age group in july we had 11 positive cases in our community of people who were 0 to 19 years old in august that jumped to 255 um and then in the first 17 days of september that went to 661 so that's not even a full month of september because we're recording this on tuesday september 21st so you can see that the the spread in younger people in in school age kids has grown enormously why is that there's really two main reasons the first one is that the delta viru delta variant is here and it's extraordinarily transmissible the second reason is that the majority of the school systems in our community do are not requiring masks and therefore it is just spreading um one of the things that we have we have learned at for from our own experience here at genesis dr reddy could you maybe and i'll come back to the school systems in a second could you describe a little bit about our experience at genesis with the mass sure since the pandemic started we've required all employees and visitors to wear a mask in the hospital and they've been this type of procedure mask and in that time we have had almost no cases of workplace transmitted coveted infection virtually all of the cases that we've had of employees positive have had an index case or the person that infected them outside of the hospital i have with the information i have today absolute 100 percent confidence that masks reduce the risk of transmission i think it's also fair to say that when you see the kids are infected most people are of the belief that most kids aren't going to get very sick with this that they're going to it's going to run its course and they'll develop natural immunity and everything will be fine unfortunately and that may be true for the children but the kids are bringing it home to people that are less healthy and we have many many cases in the hospital where the k index case has been a child bringing it home from school i'd like to read you a very poignant text message from one of my physician colleagues who was taking care of a patient on the floor this was last week today's covered news from the floor my 70 year old unvaccinated patient is dying today of covid her great niece brought it home from school the patient's daughter is her primary caregiver and is also hospitalized on a different floor also with covid the daughter gave me permission to see her in her room so i can have a face-to-face visit about her mother's rapidly declining situation the daughter wants to make a goodbye visit but she's clearly on a 100 face mask oxygen and her oxygen saturations are dropping anytime she talks cries or rolls over in the bed after sitting with her for a while and coordinating other ways she can say goodbye to her mom i asked her if there's anything else i can do for her and she says can you tell me how my husband's doing he's in the ccu on a ventilator so it doesn't take too many experiences as a caregiver in these situations to know that we have to think about doing something differently than we're doing today yeah and and so when you look at that when you look at that graph and you see that the the biggest point of infection right now in our community is our kids and that was not the case in the first in the first round of this because the kids were at home because most of the schools were not operating during our peak peak times of covet here so what we are what we're asking is um you know we've we've talked to we had a meeting the other uh yesterday uh 20th of september with all the area superintendents school superintendents and we we're asking for the schools to help us with with a even if it's not a long term um but starting out with even if it's 30 days to start out with with requiring masks in school i know that that is a is a very controversial topic um i want you to know that we have worn masks as we just just discussed we've worn mastogenesis for 18 months do i like wearing masks no i really don't um but it is the it's the only way that is that we have found that it works from preventing people it to infection infect each other is only as if everybody's doing it we know that the school systems have gotten an enormous amount of pushback on this so what i wanted to share is is an example in in our region morgan county they have they put in a mask requirement and they've only had it operating for one week the week before two weeks before they put it in they had 400 students out on quarantine and they had 33 active cases with one week of mass of masking in the schools they went down to 92 patients 92 students out on quarantine in 11 active cases and i anticipate that's going to continue to go down so it's been very proven that our problem our biggest problem the reason why that graph looks the way it did does is because of a couple things number one we've got we've got the delta vega here right with us now very very transmissible number two is we have a low vaccination rate in our community only 48 of our adults are vaccinated in our community and number three the kids are in school without masks you put all those things together and this is what you get and what we are very concerned about is that the kids won't be in school they're going to be home on quarantine and our health system is going to be over overrun and and over taxed to where we won't be able to take care of everybody and there's nowhere to send and send patients we we are it we're it for the whole region genesis is the clinical backstop for this whole region um and so what we're asking is please help us please if if the school board in your district comes with a you know requirement or you know proposals a requirement for for masks for a period of time to reduce this spread please support that we want your kids to get a really good education and the only way to do that is if for the vast majority of kids is if it's done in person so we wanted to share this information with you we you know the community you all have been so supportive of genesis in so many different ways i know that we can that you know we're all tired of this but i know we can get you know it's a tired phrase but we can get through this um if we work together on a couple of things because none of us want this to be gone more than we do and and we really appreciate any help that you can give us thank you so much you

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Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021