Ten percent of the deaths in the United States this year have been related to COVID-19 coronavirus.
That was just one of many numbers Dr. Lee Richardson, an emergency room doctor at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle, doled out when he spoke about the ongoing pandemic to the Columbus Exchange Club at their weekly meeting Thursday. Members had the chance to ask Richardson questions ranging from the accuracy of COVID-19 tests — false negatives are more common than false positives — to how the pandemic will affect the next flu season and whether young children can pass the disease to older people.
“I think we can all agree that 2020 has gone viral faster than anyone thought it would,” he said.
Since the first diagnosis of the virus in Seattle on Jan. 20, millions of people throughout the United States have caught the virus and more than 130,000 have died from it, he said — roughly the same number as have been killed by pneumonia.
Cases also continue to rise in the state. As of Wednesday evening, there are more than 48,000 confirmed cases and 1,436 deaths, according to Mississippi State Department of Health’s website. Hospitalizations across the state have rapidly increased, from 603 at the beginning of July to 950 now.
But Richardson came armed with even more localized data: Information from Lowndes County and Baptist’s Emergency Room.
“It does seem to be growing,” he said, adding that currently in Lowndes County there is a rate of 38 cases per 100,000 people.
But as of right now, there is not a shortage of hospital beds, at least in Columbus, Richardson said. He added many of the COVID-19 cases at BMH-Golden Triangle are coming from other hospitals in the Baptist Memorial Health Care system, such as the one in Jackson.
“If we didn’t have to take cases from out of the county, we wouldn’t have a crunch at all,” he said. “We have a very little crunch now.”
Columbus’ hospital has not had to end elective surgeries, like other hospitals have, he said. That’s a good sign not only because it means there aren’t too many COVID-19 patients that the hospital can’t take other patients, but elective surgeries are a source of revenue for the hospital.
Other hospitals, though, are running out of room.
“The day before yesterday, Jackson had 272 (intensive care unit) beds,” he said. “They had two open. Forty percent of them are COVID positive, 60 percent are not.”
It’s actually not that unusual to have that many people in an ICU, he said — it’s just unusual for that many of them to be carrying the same disease.
The other problem with that is COVID-19 patients can stay in the hospital anywhere from six to 41 days, he said.
“They stay in the hospital for a long time, tying up an ICU bed for a rather extended period,” he said. “That seems to be more the problem. It’s not how many, it’s once we get them, we don’t move them. They stay there for a while.”
About 50 percent of COVID-19 positive people admitted to the ICU — which Richardson stressed is a very small percentage of people who actually get the virus — end up on ventilators.
“If you get on the ventilator, that’s bad,” he said. “… Probably around 75 percent of folks we’re putting on ventilators now don’t come off alive. That compares with 40-50 percent of the people with put on ventilators with pneumonia.
“Probably by now everybody knows of somebody that has had coronavirus,” he added. “Probably everybody knows somebody that’s actually died from coronavirus.”
Facts and figures
Nearly half the deaths in the United States have been people 80 or older, he said; 25 percent have been 70-79; 17 percent have been 60-69 and 8 percent have 50-59. The older you are, the more likely you are to die from the disease. Mississippi has had no deaths under the age of 18.
“This is an older person’s problem, basically,” he said.
He said one recent study in South Korea suggests that most children under 10 don’t even transmit the disease to older people, much less become ill from it themselves.
That said, Richardson cautioned, teenagers and young people are extremely likely to pass the disease on to older friends, relatives and people in their communities.
The disease has also ravaged nursing homes and assisted living communities, he said. Ten of the 19 deaths in Lowndes County have been individuals living in residential care facilities.
He echoed advice from health experts around the state and the country: Wear a mask and wash your hands.
Richardson also briefly discussed vaccines, of which three are currently in the works. Typically it takes two years to develop a vaccine for a disease — “and that’s pushing it,” he said — but this one may come out more quickly.
He stressed that while this strain of coronavirus is new, the virus itself is not, and it has never been much of a problem before.
“Coronavirus has been around for thousands of years,” he said. “We’ve never developed a vaccine in the past because it mutates so fast, and it was so benign that it was never worth fooling with because once you develop a vaccine … the virus would have mutated out of it so it wouldn’t be affected.
“There are some folks that are saying this is going to be like the flu,” he added. “A yearly thing, and we’re going to have yearly vaccines like the flu. It may be.”
However, he warned, people over 65 who contract COVID-19 have almost five times as high a chance of dying as if they catch flu, he said.
He added he thinks the pandemic will result in more people being aware of their health and simple preventative measures, such as frequent handwashing and making sure to get a flu shot every year. He said even at Baptist’s ER, doctors are now washing their hands in front of patients.
“I think this is going to change the way we do a lot of things,” he said.
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