Physicans: ‘More Work to Do’ With COVID-19

Heading into the final full week of stay-at-home directives from the state and from local governments in Kansas, physicians at the University of Kansas Hospital said today that public efforts to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic here had clearly paid off, as evidenced by a declining rate of hospitalizations.

The Kansas directive issued by Gov. Laura Kelly expires on May 3, as does the Clay County guidance, while Kansas City, Mo., is looking at May 15 to relax its call for non-essential workers and others to remain at home. Regardless of when a local community starts returning to a more normal life, physicians say, it can’t be the norm that existed before the illness exploded across the nation in March.

With the demand curve for health-care services successfully flattened, said Steven Stites, medical director for the hospital “as a society opens up, the challenge is to keep it that way. That will be about individual personal responsibility: When you leave your house, make sure to keep six feet of distance between you and the next person. And if you’re sick, don’t go out.”

He was joined at this morning briefing by U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who addressed the federal response to the crisis with this week’s passage of additional relief for small businesses, hospitals, virus-testing and vaccine-research support, and assistance to farmers and livestock producers.

Also on the panel was Jessica Kalender-Rich, a hospital physician active in geriatric and nursing-home care. Her world, especially, will change as the economy opens up, because nursing homes in particular have been the health-care facilities hardest hit by the virus. Nationwide, the majority of fatalities attributed to COVID-19 involved people older than 75, according to the centers for Disease Control.

“Thse facilites are really made up of the most vulnerable population—they are frail, older and liing in congregate settings because they need extra help,” Kalender-Rich said. “They have a higher risk from any illness out there, and this is not an exception.”

Efforts to control the spread in nursing homes will likely remain in place until the threat has subsided, including restrictions on visitation, increased use of protective equipment for patients and staff, and additional testing, she said.

Moran addressed the $310 billion that Congress authorized to replenish the original $349 billion under the Paycheck Protection Program. That first phase passed on March 31 but was depleted within 10 business days.

In Kansas, Moran said, 427,000 jobs were salvaged with nearly 27,000 loans for a total of $4.2 billion. Millions in additional funding, he said, would go to health-care facilities, this time including municipally owned hospitals that were excluded from assistance in the first round of funding.

Hawkinson reported that the daily COVID-19 census at the hospital stood at 24, with 11 of those in intensive care. Those numbers have fallen by roughly a third from the peak of admissions two weeks ago.

The hospital is now administering roughly 500 tests a day, he said, and the results have inspired cautious optimism. “We hope to see fewer hospitalizations and critical cases” in the coming days, he said.

With elective surgeries on hold and a pullback on ambulatory care, Stites said, the hospital has been able to provide 50 staff members to assist the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s massive contact-tracing efforts involving confirmed cases of COVID-19, and the adjacent KU School of Medicine has also volunteered staffers.

“How far will that go? Not far enough,” Stites said. “We have more work to do.”