Skip to main content

New story in Health from Time: The COVID-19 Pandemic Kept Thousands of People From Getting Urgent Medical Care, CDC Says



When COVID-19 lockdowns were first announced in March, doctors also urged patients to postpone all but the most necessary procedures and appointments to save space in hospitals. Many elective surgeries were pushed off, and routine care was mostly moved online.

From the beginning, doctors feared these difficult but necessary precautions would have an unintended consequence: Dissuading from people who actually did need immediate care from getting it. Now, new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirm that concern.

During the 10 weeks after the U.S. declared the coronavirus a national emergency, there was a noticeable drop in the number of Americans seeking care at emergency rooms, even for urgent issues like heart attacks, strokes and hyperglycemic crises (a life-threatening complication of diabetes), the CDC found. Compared to pre-pandemic times, about 20% fewer people visited emergency rooms for heart attack and stroke care during those 10 weeks, and about 10% fewer did for diabetes care.

That means about 13,000 people apparently skipped going to the ER for heart attacks during those weeks; 11,000 for strokes; and about 2,000 for hyperglycemic crises. The starkest drops were seen among adults 65 and older for heart attack and stroke, and people 44 and younger for hyperglycemic crisis.

Natural declines of that magnitude are “biologically implausible” for such a short time period, the CDC says. Instead, it’s more likely that people chose not to come to the emergency room, perhaps because they were afraid of being exposed to COVID-19 or didn’t want to break stay-at-home orders.

The CDC’s report is based on information from the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, which collects data from a subset of hospitals in 47 states and the District of Columbia and captures about 73% of emergency visits nationwide. It does not, however, track mortality data—so the CDC’s report couldn’t say how many of the people who skipped urgent care later died, or how many sought care somewhere other than an emergency room.

Previous studies have suggested that the coronavirus pandemic has driven up death rates even for unrelated conditions. For example, New York City recorded about 24,000 more deaths than would be expected from March 11 to May 2—but only about 80% were tied to COVID-19. At least some of the remaining 20% of victims likely died because they didn’t seek care for unrelated health issues when they otherwise would have.

A similar trend seems to have played out at the national level. By April 4, about 15,000 excess deaths were confirmed in the U.S., but only about 8,000 coronavirus deaths were recorded during that time period, according to a Yale data analysis commissioned by the Washington Post.

While staying home is an important way to limit the spread of COVID-19, it should not come at the expense of needed medical care. In its new report, the CDC urges Americans to seek care if they experience severe symptoms like chest pain, altered mental state or loss of motor function, “irrespective of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

New story in Health from Time: COVID-19 Has Been ‘Apocalyptic’ for Public Transit. Will Congress Offer More Help?

While trying to get to work over the past few months, Brittany Williams, a Seattle home care worker, has often been passed by two or three buses before one stops to let her board. Buses in her area that once carried anywhere from about 50 to 100 passengers have been limited to between 12 and 18 to prevent overcrowding in response to coronavirus, and Williams’ commute, typically a half-hour ride, now takes more than double that time. Other Seattle transit riders have described budgeting as much as an extra hour per trip to account for the reduced capacity, eating into their time at work, school or with family. Even with the ridership limits in place, Williams, 34, doesn’t feel safe on public transit. Some passengers don’t wear face coverings, and bus drivers sometimes ignore capacity limits, she says. On one ride with her seven-year-old son, she decided to get off at a stop far from her home after a driver allowed a crowd of people to board. “It’s very trying. I’ll put...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: An At-Home Coronavirus Test May Be On the Way in the U.S.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in the U.S. , there’s a new urgency to make sure there are as many tests as possible to diagnose people who have symptoms that might indicate an infection. Knowing if people are positive is important for guiding their next steps: self-isolation, avoiding contact with others, and, if their symptoms get worse, seeking medical care. To date, access to tests has been spotty at best across the country, and while more kits are now available than even a week ago , most are gene-based assays that take several days for commercial labs to process and produce results. That may change in about two months if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives Emergency Use Authorization to the first blood-based COVID-19 test in the U.S. Scanwell Health, an at-home test company based in California, licensed the rights to a test developed by Chinese company Innovita, which was used extensively at the height of country’s epidemic earlier this year. “The ...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: A Montana Care Home Refused Free COVID-19 Tests. Now, Nearly Every Resident Has Coronavirus

(BILLINGS, Mont.) — It was meant to be a last line of defense to protect the most vulnerable as the coronavirus spread across the United States : Montana officials offered free testing in May for staff and residents at assisted living and long-term care facilities. But not all of them followed through, according to state data, including a facility in Billings, Montana’s largest city, that cares for people with dementia and other memory problems. The virus has infected almost every resident and killed eight, accounting for almost a quarter of Montana’s 34 confirmed deaths. Thirty-six employees also have tested positive at the facility where 59 people lived before the deaths began. Read more: ‘It’s Getting Worse.’ Nursing Home Workers Confront Risks in Facilities Devastated by Coronavirus While Montana’s rates of confirmed infections and deaths are much lower than other parts of the country, the outbreak at Canyon Creek Memory Care illustrates that even the most simple an...
Read more