Six months have passed since the arrival of COVID-19 — What is the state of the response?
Chester County, PA — COVID-19 cases have been rising near Philadelphia and other suburban areas leaving patients, providers and public health officials to face renewed struggles against the effects of the virus. The following interviews with providers, patients and public officials cast light on these continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the virus continues to plague the nation month after month, the immediate consequences and aftermath of the deadly disease have continued to mount for healthcare professionals. Nationwide reports of understaffed hospitals with inadequate equipment have flooded the news cycle since March, but much of this additional burden upon hospitals comes from elsewhere. While it is easy to imagine hospital staff being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and rushing to supply ventilators room to room, Paoli Hospital RN Jeanne Levasseur says the added expectations on healthcare professionals stem from the “aftereffects of isolation.” These aftereffects grow and grow as people are isolated for longer periods of time and as time passes depression, anxiety, loneliness and dread manifest themselves in more and more harmful ways.
Citing an extremely alarming rise in suicide attempts and substance abuse, LeVasseur says she and her staff are dealing with ever increasing levels of self harm: “These cases are really at the heart of our staffing issues. Patients who attempt suicide require around-the-clock supervision and if I am sitting with one of these patients, then I can’t help anyone else through my shift.” Levasseur is experienced in treating cases such as these, but they are becoming darker and more common as the pandemic rages. She says that “one night last week a patient came in who had tried to overdose on Midol. She was 16 years old.” With a nurse taken off the floor with each of these cases, the hospital staff is squeezed more and more as the numbers rise. LeVasseur says that morale has stayed relatively high among the staff despite the lack of manpower and resources, but that every individual can help them by following the CDC guidelines about COVID-19 and generally staying healthy in every available way.
While the perspective of a frontline employee in the fight against the pandemic is invaluable and LeVasseur speaks of hope in the healthcare field, there is a reasonable, but unclear fear of entering a hospital that exists among the general public. Many of us have been consciously more careful in our daily lives in order to avoid any unnecessary trips to the emergency room that might include the possibility of COVID-19 exposure. What about those who cannot avoid it? South Philadelphia business owner and recent Pennsylvania Hospital patient Marco Farnese had thoughts to share on what it is like to be a patient during the pandemic. Farnese has taken the pandemic seriously from the very beginning and has followed every precaution to keep him and his wife safe from infection. Both are at a higher risk simply due to their age and have been extraordinarily careful of exposure for months on end. Unfortunately, he could not prepare for an unexpected bout of cancer discovered earlier this summer and has since had to break his set of quarantine rules to begin chemotherapy treatment and undergo several surgeries.
Farnese says the competency of the staff and the quality of care he received made him feel “comfortable” in the hospital, saying that “it really wasn’t so terrible and I feel alright now, though I’d go through moments of panic about how many rooms the nurse had been in before — if everyone was really following the guidelines. The only incident that worried me was when a man brought in my meal, he had his mask down under his nose.” Farnese states that the staff did test him for COVID-19 upon arrival for his prior surgeries, but states that the last time he went into Pennsylvania Hospital for chemotherapy that the staff had “stopped taking temperatures.” He is concerned about that and hopes they reinstate the older policy. His experience echoes many others, as Americans still must visit hospitals and clinics for routine and emergency services despite the pandemic and its risks.
While battling the pandemic both healthcare professionals and patients must also work within the systems that have governed the public response to COVID-19. Along with the mortality and danger associated with the virus, this disease has exposed deep political divisions at the local, state and federal levels of leadership that have affected the choices that decide how we as citizens fare. To share some information about how this has played out at a local government level in a more rural area, North Carolina’s Macon County Public Health Department Information Officer Emily Ritter spoke with me over the phone about the county’s response to the virus. Ritter’s main duties consist of educating the county population about public health measures and specifically the teaching of practices that protect against infectious diseases. Ritter says that political disagreements in leadership along with a long standing shortage of specific medical supplies needed by the MCPHD form the greatest barriers to COVID-19 relief in Macon County. She says that while the guidelines that were proposed by the CDC and the MCPHD were generally accepted at first in Macon County, guards were dropped as the months went on and local leaders began to publicly voice their doubts in the reality of the virus. She fears a new spike of cases in the area because “the measures we put in place were working, so now people think they don’t need to keep following them and have stopped taking it seriously.”
Currently “people at high levels such as the county commissioners and county manager are playing politics with people’s health” Ritter says, citing the lack of support and outright derelictions of duty from higher levels of government. She mentions that an egregious example of this problem can be seen in the county sheriff. Due to a smaller web of public services, much of the immediate response to the virus in rural communities has fallen upon local sheriff’s departments. These deputies are often the first on the scene of medical emergencies when ambulances are few and far between and they are handling added duties during the pandemic, but according to Ritter the Macon County Sheriff, Robby Holland, “doesn’t believe in it.” Ritter says that Holland, among others in local law enforcement have shared their doubts since early March and have simply refused to take the virus seriously.
With Holland as the most visible public figure in the area, his actions have set a bad example that Ritter and the MCPHD must counter if they hope to battle the virus more effectively. To combat this, Ritter says that “we need bold choices right now, but those in higher levels of county management are not willing to sacrifice or lead.” With elections coming and tensions high in Macon County as elsewhere, the political divisions on science and health will surely become wider. Clearly this difference in viewpoints is unhelpful and coming together in agreement with the nation’s scientists and doctors would certainly be a step in the right direction of bridging the gap.
These perspectives from surrounding angles of the American reaction to COVID-19 provide a glimpse into how nationwide trends of the national health crisis are playing out at the individual level. While one While wide-reaching responses to the virus have been reduced over the past few months, the virus continues to claim thousands of lives and wreak havoc on our institutions. National leadership has refused to act in recent months and has left the thought of another bill such as the CARES Act extremely unlikely. While healthcare professionals are stretched thinly, patients are concerned and public officials are frustrated, every American can help ease their burdens by following the official guidelines.