The University of Kansas Health System has had a slight drop in the number of COVID-19 since yesterday. Ten people with the active virus are being treated, down from 13 yesterday. Of those patients, six are in the ICU, down from seven yesterday. Three of those patients are on ventilators, the same as yesterday. Ten other patients are still hospitalized because of COVID-19 but are out of the acute infection phase, up from eight yesterday. That’s a total of 20 patients, down from 21 yesterday. HaysMed reports a total of four active COVID-19 patients today, with none in the recovery phase. Yesterday they had four total patients with three active and one in the recovery phase.
On today’s Morning Media Update, we were joined by the founder of the COVID Care Force, Dr. Gary Morsch. He created the COVID Care Force one year ago to bring volunteer doctors and nurses together to care for vulnerable populations. He had a remarkable story to share about his experiences with Navajo and Chickasaw nations, in particular, and what we can learn from them.
Dr. Gary Morsch is an emergency physician by training, and as co-founder of Heart to Heart International, he is used to responding to health emergencies and disasters around the world. When the pandemic hit, he created a new organization called the COVID Care Force to mobilize a large group of volunteer healthcare professionals to deploy to areas of critical healthcare staffing shortages. Among those vulnerable populations are Native American reservations like the Navajo Nation, the largest in the country, which takes up parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. He described the dire conditions of the Navajos, who told him that their elders were dying from the disease at the highest rate in the country, and they were in danger of losing an entire generation. He explained how his organization helped turn things around, and in his words, their situation has “flip flopped.” He says the Navajos are a great example of how to get the pandemic under control. Once they knew the problem, they established mandatory masking, stay at home orders, and essentially shut down the reservation. He says it worked because the Navajo people respect their leaders and their community and have a culture of acting for the greater good, not just for the individual. When vaccinations became available, they embraced them and so far, more than half of their 375,000 members have been vaccinated. He says they will reach herd immunity before the rest of the country. Morsch adds that today marks the tenth day without a single COVID-19 death and says, “they have stopped COVID on their reservation.” He’s seen similar results with the Crow Tribe in Montana and the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In all, the COVID Care Force has sent about 75 medical teams to 30 different sites in North and South America and Mexico, treating a quarter of a million patients. Volunteers usually sign up for a two-week assignment, with all expenses paid. Right now, he says nurses are their greatest need. To volunteer, or find more information, visit https://covidcareforce.org/
Dana Hawkinson, MD, medical director of Infection Prevention and Control at The University of Kansas Health System, said the numbers in the Metro area are creeping up and he’s concerned by that trend. He especially notes more young people are getting multi-system inflammatory syndrome. He says while many young people do have less severe infections, they can still spread the virus and get significant disease. He firmly believes that vaccinations will be our way out of the pandemic and urges us to help those who are still unsure to find the information they need to make an informed decision.
Steve Stites, MD, chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, thinks we’ll see a change in vaccine hesitancy when the FDA gives full approval to the vaccines and many places will require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, just like with the flu. That could happen as early as this fall. Right now, he says the health system has given nearly 72,000 vaccinations with 12,000 currently available. He urges current health system patients to register on MyChart and others to call 913-588-1227, or sign up at kansashealthsystem.com/vaccine. He says we are all volunteers in life and we are given a choice about what is the right thing to do. He hopes we all do the best thing we can for everyone around us and spread the story of how much safer vaccines will make our lives.
Thursday, April 22 at 8:00 a.m. is the next Morning Media Update, and we’ve reached a milestone of 200,000 COVID-19 lab tests.as a health system. That is out of 4.2 million tests overall in the last year with a lab that operates 24/7. Dr. Rachael Liesman, director of Microbiology in pathology and laboratory and Marissa Larson, medical lab scientist will join to talk about our COVID testing and more.
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