@cherry wrote:
from the Free Press
r. Valerie Vaughn, 35, a hospitalist, and lead of a moderate-care unit for coronavirus patients at Michigan Medicine. She also is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. (Photo: Joe Hallisy/Michigan Medicine)
At Michigan Medicine, Dr. Valerie Vaughn, a hospitalist who also is an assistant professor at the U-M Medical School, said emergency surgeries never stopped, but now, "we’re starting to do more of those semi-urgent surgeries, the cancer surgeries. We’re in the process of talking about doing those now because that also hurts people if we're having to delay those things.”
Although hospitals are starting to ease into more surgeries, Vaughn said that doesn’t mean it's a good idea to loosen all the restrictions Whitmer has put in place to slow the spread of the virus.
“If we just open up the state immediately, a lot more people are going to die,” said Vaughn, who was the co-medical director in converting a regular hospital unit into Michigan Medicine’s negative-pressure Regional Infectious Containment Unit to help handle the COVID-19 surge.
“We can't just reopen society, bam, on May 1. If we did that, our hospital would be overwhelmed again,” she said.
“When we were initially planning without social distancing, we were estimating that between 2,000 and 5,000 patients would need to be hospitalized at the University of Michigan. Instead, ... about two weeks after social distancing went into effect ... our curve stopped being exponential and started flattening. And I'm telling you, we breathed the collective sigh of relief.”
That’s when the university put on hold plans to open a field hospital at its indoor track to handle a rush of COVID-19 patients.
More: University of Michigan puts plan to open temporary hospital on hold
“We were talking about putting 500-1,000 beds in there, and it just was overwhelming,” Vaughn said. “I never want to have to see that building come to fruition. If we reopened the entire state on May 1, we would need that plus more to cover the number of people that need to be hospitalized.
“Luckily, I don't think our governor is going to let that happen, where the entire state opens up at once.
“But I do foresee some sort of phased reopening, and I think what is going to be necessary is widespread testing capacity. We've developed our own internal test here at the University of Michigan and increased our capacity to test both our patients and nursing homes.
“But we need more than that. We need to be able to do widespread testing of asymptomatic people. We need to … figure out how many people have antibodies — asymptomatic carriers of the disease who therefore are most likely to be immune.
“If we can get to that stage, we can really start to think about how to reopen in small ways to help the economy while not overwhelming our hospitals again. Because we are by no means out of the woods.”
Thank you for posting that Cherry. Valuable info!!!!
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