Kansas City, Kan- Key points from today’s guests:
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- We mark a milestone of four years since the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. The health system admitted its very first patient with COVID on March 9, 2020.
- Days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. And exactly four years ago today, on March 13, the U.S. declared COVID a national emergency. Without vaccines or natural immunity, the novel Coronavirus continued to spread around the world.
- It's just remarkable to me that we quickly forget what happened from pandemics and not take the time to learn from them.
- When I would read the newspaper articles about the influenza pandemic in the 1800s, there was a large amount of public discourse of anger and hostility about masking, and there were mask riots, which sounds like what happened around COVID.
- People wanted to quickly move on from the pandemic in 1918. Denial is a powerful and dangerous tool, so we didn’t learn big public health lessons then.
- When we look back at the COVID pandemic, there is no question that public health measures have bent the curve and blunted the impact of not only death from COVID but death from other diseases.
- This was immensely important because when we had a health system that was overwhelmed, we couldn’t take care of all the sick people with heart attacks, cancer patients with cancer wouldn't come to the hospital and other people wouldn't go get their diagnosis because they're afraid to go to the hospital.
- When you get overwhelmed as a health care delivery system, it doesn't just affect the people with the disease, it's overwhelming the system and affects all diseases.
- I do think one of the lessons learned from this pandemic is that people will listen to reason when you have a rational, fair, and honest discussion about it, as opposed to one where people are going to shout at each other. One way to connect is just have an honest, faithful discussion rooted in science.
Dr. Chris Crenner, M.D., Ph.D., chair, Department of History & Philosophy of Medicine, KUMC School of Medicine
- There are several similarities between past historical pandemics to what we just faced with the COVID pandemic.
- The first “modern” pandemic was a cholera outbreak in the 1800s. It traveled fast along trade routes, and it was global for the first time.
- Cholera came like this all through the 19th century in waves, one wave after another emanating out as new strains and as new kinds of transports happen.
- Eventually, a brilliant physician John Snow was able to convince people during the cholera pandemic in London at that time that this was a waterborne disease, and if you cleaned up your water, you could change things.
- The worst modern pandemic was probably the 1918 influenza epidemic, often called the Spanish flu. There's a good theory it started in Kansas, but it hopped quickly over to Europe and didn't strike in America until a little later in 1918. It was devastating as it killed probably 20-30 million people across the world.
- The polio story is one of those success stories. It would have been far worse if we hadn't been moved quickly and developed a vaccine and embarked on a program to vaccinate the whole population, which is one of the more successful vaccine programs in history.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director of Infection Prevention and Control, The University of Kansas Health System
- The hospital COVID count for this week is at 12 inpatients, which is a decrease of 15 inpatients last week.
- Always wear a mask if you're feeling a need to or if you're not comfortable. More importantly, use good hand hygiene -- washing your hands frequently or using the alcohol hand sanitizer and really trying to avoid putting your hands in your eyes, your nose, your mouth.
- As more people travel for spring break, please be careful traveling and get caught up on vaccines.
- Thinking back on COVID, we all need to act as if we are on this planet together because we are so linked and we saw that with supply chain shortages and with worker shortages.
- We need to continue to evaluate that and really try to prepare for the future. Hopefully this thing will never happen again in our lifetimes, but we just need to understand that we are in a chronic battle given the history of pandemics.
