Hospital admissions are still up nearly 50 percent from when the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force began reporting numbers two weeks ago. The task force includes the region’s four major health care systems: BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St Luke’s Hospital.
“The surge is continuing,” said Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander of the task force and chief medical officer for SSM Health, during his briefing on Friday, April 17 .
So how does Garza feel about Gov. Mike Parson setting a date of May 4 to lift his Stay at Home order?
Garza said he doesn’t disagree with the “underpinnings” of Parson’s four-tier plan to lift the statewide Stay at Home order. Those four pillars include expanding testing, expanding Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), expanding hospital capacity and predicting potential outbreaks.
“The date isn’t as important as the strategy and the foundational blocks that we need to have in place in order to deal with this virus going forward,” Garza said. “The things that the governor laid out, I don’t think anyone disagrees with.”
However, because of the lack of testing supplies, the task force doesn’t know what the extent of disease is in the community, he said. The region’s hospitals still lack testing and PPE supplies, he added.
“Anything to ramp up production and supplies, we would be in favor of,” he said.
As far as increasing hospital capacity, he feels the task force’s healthcare systems have done a good job with that.
“Where we could use assistance as well is in preventing cases rather than increasing healthcare capacity,” Garza said. “If we increase healthcare capacity, that means we already have an increased number of cases, and again the objective is to decrease the increased number of cases. Then that would lead me to believe that we need to do other things in the community to decrease transmission.”
Those things include taking care of the region’s at-risk population, including the homeless, and improving public health infrastructure. It also means more contact tracing, or tracking where people have been exposed to the virus.
“In order to identify hot spots in the community and to be able to clamp down and decrease transmission, we would need a much more robust platform than we have right now,” Garza said. “The data is irrelevant. We have to have that strategy and that infrastructure in place first.”
On April 17, Garza reported that there were 684 people hospitalized, with 173 in the intensive care unit (ICU) and 144 of those on ventilators. On the plus side, he said another 60 patients were discharged from the hospital.
“We have to continue our relentless work to flatten and extend the curve,” Garza said. “It’s up to all of us to continue to practice all those things we have been talking about for the last couple weeks: staying at home, social distancing, washing our hands and continuing to drive the numbers down.”
