St. Thomas More Hospital has seen a steady number of COVID patients since the pandemic began more than a year and a half ago, but that volume steadily has been increasing during the past six to eight weeks.
Dr. Kendall Rockler, the Chief Medical Officer for St. Thomas More Hospital, said the number of beds and the ICU availability varies day-to-day.
“We are very busy,” she said. “We do have some increased wait times in our ER just because of the sheer number of patients who are coming in who are sick. We are seeing both COVID sick, and we are seeing patients who are ill for other reasons.”
The general consensus in the medical community is there’s some delayed care because people weren’t seeking care early on, trying to stay out of the hospitals, she said.
“Now we are seeing a steady increase of people who have waited and are ill,” she said. “So we are caring for those patients while at the same time we are caring for patients with COVID at a number we have not seen previously.”
St. Thomas More currently has plenty of ventilators in-house, but if there is a need, there’s an option to convert an anesthesia machine into a ventilator.
Despite potential increased wait times, Rockler said the ER will not turn patients away.
“That is not ever going to happen,” she said. “Every person who presents into the emergency department will be seen.”
Some surgeries have had to be canceled, but the hospital makes that determination on a day-to-day basis.
“As volumes go up, we will continue to keep those surgeries canceled,” she said. “As they start to go down, we look at resuming them.”
Staff continues to provide care for patients 24/7 after the state mandate that required employees in licensed healthcare facilities to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 31. Throughout Centura’s 17-hospital system in Colorado and Kansas, there were only 12 people who were not compliant.
“That really shows how important our health is to us to be able to be there to take care of a patient,” Rockler said. “I think as a general group of associates, we came together so that we could be here and be healthy so that we could care for the patients in the community.”
When Rockler compares what’s going on now to the beginning of the pandemic, the focus originally was on the elderly. In the beginning, the thought was that the younger population wasn’t affected and they were safe not to get the vaccine.
“What we are seeing now is a very large number of younger individuals contracting the disease and having not just serious side effects from it where they have long-term lung damage, but they’re actually being ventilated and in some cases actually dying,” she said. “I think that has been the biggest shift for me as a physician, to see how it was really affecting the elderly population initially, but now we’re seeing it in a much younger population.”
To protect the younger population, the FDA in October approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5-11.
The dosage is one-third of an adult dose and it’s a two-shot series.
Rockler said with any immunization, there can be an array of potential side effects, but what she’s seen in children has been mild, including soreness, headaches and fatigue, nothing particularly significant.
As a physician, she recommends the vaccine for children, but she advises parents to reach out to a trusted health care provider so they can make a conscious, well-informed decision about what’s best for their child.
“I think you need to talk to your pediatrician, and every parent needs to make their own decision for their family,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that this is a more risky immunization. Again, it is a family decision, sometimes you bring the child in to make that decision based on their age and ability to understand.”
A smaller proportion of people who are vaccinated have had breakthrough infections, but when one is vaccinated, Rockler said, it exponentially decreases the risk of becoming significantly sick from the disease.
“Even if you do get COVID or one of the variants and you do get the illness, the likelihood of being hospitalized or being placed on a breathing tube or death is exponentially decreased,” she said. “That’s similar with other vaccines that we’ve seen throughout time – the flu, also. It is beneficial to get the vaccine as a protective measure.”
The technology used to develop the vaccine has been utilized and studied for an extended period of time, she said.
“It has gone through all of the FDA testing and everything that is based on our previous standards for approval of vaccines,” she said. “I do not believe that the timeframe is affecting its safety in any way. They would not have approved it through the FDA if it had not gone through all of the safety measures.”
