Health officials had predicted it, and now it’s here.
After several weeks of high daily case counts, hospitalizations in Allegheny County have steadily increased, with a record 22 hospitalizations reported on Friday.
In the past 19 days, the county topped 200 new cases eight times, with an average of 182 cases per day. Amid the increase in cases that started in late June, county health department officials warned that hospitalizations would likely be as follows. Health Director Debra Bogen said they would likely lag behind the new cases, as infected people gradually became ill.
Dr. Tariq Cheema, a lung and critical care physician at Allegheny Health Network, said the increase is nothing unexpected. It was “bound to happen,” he said.
“If you really look back, we’ve been saying this all along,” said Cheema.
Cheema said AHN has seen more covid-19 patients in network hospitals in the past two and a half weeks or so, as cases began to accelerate.
While the number of hospitalizations is an important metric to look at, there is still more context to consider, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert based in Pittsburgh. People should also consider the length of stay of patients and the percentage of beds available in the ICU, he said.
“We have not heard anything from hospitals in southwestern Pennsylvania that are stressed,” said Adalja. “Hospitalizations are something to watch, but they cannot be interpreted on their own. … That information needs a little more context to make a practical recommendation. “
UPMC doctors in recent weeks have described an increase in covid-19 patients, but they rated that by saying their symptoms have been less severe and stay for shorter periods.
“However, we still have to be vigilant,” Dr. Donald Yealy, UPMC’s chief of emergency medicine, said earlier this month. “Even young people have a responsibility not only with themselves but with others. They cannot know who is at greater risk than others. “
Cheema said that while patient levels are increasing in AHN hospitals, there has not yet been a sharp rebound in patients who flood intensive care units or are placed on ventilators.
This suggests that patients don’t appear to be as sick as they had been during April or May, but that’s difficult to say for sure, Cheema said. The best results for patients could be due to a younger cohort of infected individuals who can recover more easily, or it could be because the network has more treatment options, or perhaps they have come across a completely different strain of the virus. Cheema said current patients may also get sick enough to receive ICU treatment as the weeks go by. Only time will tell.
“The real concern should be from day one, when you see cases increase,” he said, noting that recent reports estimating reported cases of the virus probably represent only about 10% of the total total. She also emphasized the high rate of positive tests the county has experienced in the past few weeks, sometimes climbing to around 12% to 15% of all tests.
Cheema said it is important to remember that there is still no vaccine and that the treatments that have been discovered are not curative, only supportive. The reopening of the country around Memorial Day appears to have caused much complacency, he said.
“This virus is not going to go away,” he said. “He never left.”
“Focus on the things we can do,” he added. “Every person has to take individual responsibility.”
That includes, Adalja said, cooperating with Allegheny County Health Department contact trackers to help identify and eliminate critical sparks of infection.
“The fact is, we still have to be aggressive and we have to make sure that people behave as if they were in a pandemic,” Adalja said.
Teghan Simonton is a writer for the Tribune-Review. You can contact Teghan at 724-226-4680, [email protected] or via Twitter.
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