COVID’s latest rise “hammers emergency workers”

ANN TREE – Earlier this year, the Michigan Medicine emergency department had almost no patients with COVID. But that changed in late March when suddenly nine patients tested positive for COVID-19, six of whom required hospital stays.

The latest spring surge has hit Metro Detroit’s hospital systems hard, and with cases and deaths continuing to rise, health officials sound the alarm.

“It marked a sudden exit from where we had been,” Brad Uren, a physician in Michigan Department of Emergency Medicine, Brad Uren, said in a press release. “Now we have to control it because that has the potential to overwhelm the healthcare system.”

Read: 54 takeaways: Beaumont officials on restrictions in Michigan, terrible hospital situation, COVID statistics

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Uren said that while people stayed home last year, as the state and the world debuted to learn more about the new virus and how it spreads, the lack of restrictions on collection and food has contributed to current figures.

“People were staying at home, people were isolated and masked, we distanced ourselves,” Uren said in a statement. “Now, we are not so diligent, and there is another rise in COVID above the normal volume we see in the emergency service from normal activity. And the combination of both is increasing.

Michigan currently has the highest seven-day case rate in the country and beds are filling up quickly in hospitals.

“We are used to operating in difficult times,” Uren said in a statement. “But we’re working on the edge of the envelope of what many of us would consider anything normal right now.”

Another worrying factor: COVID patients at Michigan Medicine are getting younger.

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Uren said this is probably due to the prioritization of older adults to receive the first COVID-19 vaccines and then to the fact that people between the ages of 20 and 50 work outside the home and have more mobility.

According to Michigan Medicine, emergency visits for COVID to the hospital’s pediatric population also experienced a 10-20% shock.

Read: Michigan COVID Metric: Cases, Hospitalizations, “Incredibly Worrying” Positivity Rate

While it is rare for a child to be admitted for symptoms of COVID, they are for those with pre-existing conditions.

“We are seeing an increase in pediatric COVID, many in the age group of young adolescents, possibly motivated by transmission due to athletic sports at school,” Prashant Mahajan, head of the pediatric emergency department at Michigan Medicine CS Mott Children’s Hospital. a release.

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Both doctors suspect that the increase in cases in younger populations is due to the more contagious variant B.1.1.7, which is known to be active in Michigan.

One of the main concerns of COVID cases in children is the development of a rare multisystem inflammatory syndrome called MIS-C.

“We haven’t seen many of these children, but it’s something we should anticipate happening,” Mahajan said in a statement. “The other thing that is really unknown is what proportion of children end up having long-term effects of the virus, which is now increasingly recognized in adults with COVID.”

Read: The University of Michigan doctor answers questions from parents about a dangerous condition of COVID in children

Despite a steady increase in vaccinations, this new wave is beginning to show tension from hospital workers, Uren said.

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“I see it daily in the face of my co-workers,” he said in a statement. “We’re working as a team and I’m very proud to have been with this for so long, but it weighs on people.”

Doctors in the Michigan Department of Emergency Medicine are asking people to get vaccinated, to limit who they interact with, and to follow distancing and social masking.

“I am concerned that the vaccination of the vaccine will slow us down and continue to cause us problems even after a time when vaccines could return to normal,” Uren said in a statement. “We are ready to end the virus. It hasn’t happened to us yet. “