Michigan’s seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases has dropped 14 percent in the past week.
The average seven-day positivity rate on coronavirus diagnostic tests decreased for the 11th consecutive day.
Michigan finally turning a corner with the third wave of coronavirus?
“Ask me this question in a week,” said Dr. Liam Sullivan, an infectious disease specialist for Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids.
“Too soon to say,” said Dr. Paul Entler, vice president of Sparrow Health System in Lansing. “I’d like to see the numbers worth another week.”
“I have two theories,” Dr. Joel Fishbein, a Grosse Pointe infectious disease specialist, told Beaumont Health. “The first theory is that this week, everyone is incubating from exposures in the last two weeks and will grow again next week. If I make a mistake in this regard, it continues to decline.
“I hope I’m wrong, but let’s wait to make sure there aren’t a lot of people who are kind of smelly right now and waiting to get symptomatic,” he said. “If it drops in a week, we may be done.”
If the wave really turns, it’s not too soon. Michigan currently ranks No. 1 in the country for coronavirus transmission rates, and the ferocity of current growth has led to a record number of hospitalizations, putting serious pressure on health care resources.
“This has certainly been the worst increase for everyone,” Entler said, and one factor in this is the ongoing stress on medical staff.
The general public is unaware of the long-term impact of the pandemic on hospital workers, including the mental stress of caring for so many critically ill patients, he said. “We see more death over a long period of time than we usually see.”
And even as the number of cases dwindles, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise – no surprise, because these are lagging factors. In past increases, hospitalizations continued to rise for about two weeks after the peak in cases, and deaths for another two weeks thereafter.
A particularly worrying aspect of hospitalizations was that patients were younger and sicker compared to the first year of the pandemic, which doctors attribute to B.1.1.7. more contagious and more lethal variant.
In fact, doctors say they see fewer elderly citizens – who are more likely to be vaccinated – and many more patients under the age of 50, most of whom have only recently become eligible for COVID-19 vaccines.
“What is really alarming to me is the number of cases we encounter in the zero to 9 age group, which is much higher than before,” Sullivan said.
On Tuesday, in fact, 71 children were hospitalized in pediatric wards, which is a record.
Fishbain said he also sees a wave of younger and sicker patients. “It’s like taking what I saw before and changing it for a decade or two,” he said. “We have 20-year-olds who are admitted and young people in their 30s who need oxygen, whom we have never seen before and who need as much treatment as we can offer. We have children aged 40 and 50 who reach for the fans ”.
The good news is that while hospitalizations have increased, the increase in deaths has been less pronounced. While Michigan averages about 57 deaths a day, this is half the average at the peak of fall growth. This is the result of relatively high vaccination rates among the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from COVID-19.
The fact that people aged 65 and over have been less affected by the current increase shows the effectiveness of vaccines, doctors say, and the hope is that intensifying the vaccination program among younger adults and adolescents will also reduce the number of their cases.
However, it could be a slow process: Nearly 70% of those aged 16 to 49 have not yet received their first stroke, and it takes five to six weeks after the first dose for complete immunity to begin with. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
“We know the vaccines work,” Entler said. “The whole key to vaccines is to prevent hospitalizations and deaths, and at the moment it is proving to be true” among them are vaccinated.
However, the problem is that not enough people are fully immunized.
“The sooner we can vaccinate the young population, the sooner we can reduce it,” Entler said. “And, hopefully, we can prevent another increase.”
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