On Friday, SOVAH Health, through its Martinsville campus Facebook page, informed the public that they have four covid patients in the ICU “evenly split” at its two hospital campuses. This includes the Danville campus. Unfortunately, they are reporting that “these patients are much sicker than the patients we were seeing a year ago and frequently need care in our Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Age has not been a factor in these patients and all of the patients are either not fully vaccinated or unvaccinated. All 3 approved COVID-19 vaccines are 99.99% effective at preventing hospitalization and death.”
We hope all of these people get better, but is this something we should be worried about?
Yes, and no.
Yes, it’s bad when anyone gets sick and the Covid virus is still out there and so is this new delta-variant, which is spreading fast around the world. Health officials are also projecting virus cases to rise as you can see from this chart from healthdata.org of deaths and projected deaths.
But there is no reason to think that the virus, even if it does grow from now through the end of year with the winter season, will cause anything like the mass crisis levels it did last year. A lot of people are worried that not enough people have been vaccinated to stop the virus from spreading. This is true, but the good news is that most of the people in the United States who are most ask risk at having the most adverse health effects from infection. have been vaccinated at a much higher rate than the less at risk and much younger population. This makes it so that even if infections grow as much as they did last year in the summer, there will be less deaths and hospitalizations.
That’s not much comfort to those who end up severely sick later, though. I’m not a doctor nor an expert on viruses. I suggest you talk to one and get their advice on how to best deal with the Covid situation and its variants going forward. This is what the Chief Medical officer of the two regional SOVAH campuses said in a video on Facebook.
Be safe and be well!
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-Tim
