This week, the St. Louis region is likely seeing the height of COVID-19 infections, medical experts have estimated. Because of the stay-at-home orders and other precautions, the curve will look more like a “crest of a gentle hill” rather than a sharp peak of a mountain, said Dr. Alex Garza, chief medical officer for SSM Health.
“Over the past few weeks, our community came together to flatten the curve, and that has averted what was possibly a worse case scenario,” he said.
Garza is the incident commander for the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force. The task force includes four major health care systems: BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St Luke’s Hospital.
Every day, Garza gives a briefing on the task force’s COVID-19 statistics that represent 2.8 million people for an area that encompasses surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois in the larger St. Louis region.
Garza reported on Saturday, April 25 that there were 652 people currently hospitalized within the four medical systems, and have either tested positive for COVID-19 or are awaiting test results. Of those, 159 were in the intensive care unit (ICU) and 113 were on ventilators. More than 1,000 people have been discharged from the hospital in the last several weeks.
If the task force’s modeling is correct, he said the region should gradually move across the crest and start to see a decline in infections. However, Garza explains that models are just estimates.
“The virus plays its own game,” he said.
Experts will only know when the crest occurred after the fact, in analyzing hospitalization data. The task force is basing their modeling off the number of people hospitalized, and not the number of deaths or infections, Garza said, because it’s best data to understand the spread of the virus in the community. He understands that the community has made “incredible sacrifices” in abiding by the stay-at-home orders, he said.
“This sacrifice has saved many thousands of lives,” Garza said. “The region has made tremendous progress in the fight against a dangerous and contagious virus.”
