Coronavirus Chronicles — Milder Does Not Mean Mild

At the beginning of this year, American hospitals were in dire straits. Journalist Ed Yong looked into it for The Atlantic and interviewed, among others, Megan Ranney, a Rhode Island emergency physician, who revealed that because of staff shortages, “whole sections of beds” were closed. Yong traced how the COVID crisis crushed every part of the healthcare system:

A lack of pharmacists and outpatient clinicians makes it harder for people to get tests, vaccines, and even medications… There aren’t enough paramedics, making it more difficult for people to get to the hospital at all. Lab technicians are falling ill, which means that COVID-test results (and medical-test results in general) are taking longer to come back. Respiratory therapists are in short supply, making it harder to ventilate patients who need oxygen.

The scarce beds had to receive virus victims, meaning that people with other kinds of emergency health events or recurring chronic problems were out of luck. Even hospital patients who no longer needed acute care were affected, because they could not be released due to a shortage of beds in facilities for post-acute long-term care. And that made the shortage in general hospitals even worse. For people who depended on dialysis, mental health counseling, and many other outpatient services, support was hard to find.

A new demon

Thanks to the ambitions omicron coronavirus variant, there was a brief resurgence of public interest and even concern. “Do we need to wipe down packages that arrive, or simply stop ordering consumer goods from overseas? Should we wear gloves in the grocery store? They say this new COVID spreads really fast. What are we supposed to do about that?”

By the end of January, there were well over 600,000 new cases nationwide each and every day. Emergency room visits and hospital admissions were going way, way up. The patients had shorter stays, and not as many needed the ICU, but there were a whole lot more of them. And the daily death toll was described as “substantial.” While the overall proportion of ICU admissions and deaths may be smaller, that’s a ratio, a percentage of the whole. When the overall number is enormous, the number of people seriously damaged can still be huge.

Sneaking up

But in the realm of public awareness, it did not take long for emotions to settle down. Because the omicron variant was described as milder than some of its predecessors, many people believed (or tried to believe, or at least proclaimed) that it was no big deal, a walk in the park. Many health care professionals hastened to point out the obvious: milder does not mean mild. It just means, marginally less likely to undergo gruesome ordeals like being on a ventilator, or to die.

Meanwhile, a whole separate crisis continued to build — Long COVID, which has not yet disclosed all the mysteries of its longevity or its ultimate potential for damage. But as the year began, several mentions were made in the media of the increased occurrence of myocardial infarction (heart attack) soon after the patients had seemingly recovered from COVID. The virus was clearly observed to exacerbate several chronic illnesses, leading to the patient’s demise, but was unlikely to be listed as the cause of death — even though that chronically ill patient might have lasted several more years, had COVID not interfered.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble,” TheAtlantic.com, 01/07/22
Source: “Omicron’s wave is at least 386% taller than delta’s — and it’s crushing hospitals,” ArsTechnica.com, 1/26/2022
Image by Navy Medicine/Public Domain

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OVERWEIGHT: What Kids Say explores the obesity problem from the often-overlooked perspective of children struggling with being overweight.

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Dr. Robert A. Pretlow is a pediatrician and childhood obesity specialist. He has been researching and spreading awareness on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US for more than a decade.
You can contact Dr. Pretlow at:

Presentations

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the American Society of Animal Science 2020 Conference
What’s Causing Obesity in Companion Animals and What Can We Do About It

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the World Obesity Federation 2019 Conference:
Food/Eating Addiction and the Displacement Mechanism

Dr. Pretlow’s Multi-Center Clinical Trial Kick-off Speech 2018:
Obesity: Tackling the Root Cause

Dr. Pretlow’s 2017 Workshop on
Treatment of Obesity Using the Addiction Model

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation for
TEC and UNC 2016

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the 2015 Obesity Summit in London, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s invited keynote at the 2014 European Childhood Obesity Group Congress in Salzburg, Austria.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2013 European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2011 International Conference on Childhood Obesity in Lisbon, Portugal.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2010 Uniting Against Childhood Obesity Conference in Houston, TX.

Food & Health Resources