A momentous day in the history of the pandemic across Berrien County in the past 24-hours as Dr. Loren Hamel, head of Spectrum Health Lakeland says, “If I was a singer, I might give you a strain of the Hallelujah Chorus.” That excitement stems from the launch of the COVID-19 vaccination process at Spectrum Health Lakeland last night. In a press briefing this morning with the Berrien County Health Department, Hamel reflected on that occasion as well as sharing some of the latest case counts with Health Officer Nicki Britten today.
Hamel says, “We are, in fact, really excited because we have just under 1,000 vaccines allocated to us, inasmuch as Spectrum Health is one of the first five hospital systems in Michigan to get an allocation.” He adds, “Of course that’s spread across the system, but our share in Berrien County is just under 1,000, and we started vaccinating last night.” He went on to set the scene saying, “I was there and saw the line down the hall waiting to get vaccinated. We had excitement and a few tears, and the first (to be vaccinated) was a pulmonologist who just happened to get there first, and had a smile on her face as she got hers first.”
Hamel refers to the event as being a turning point, saying, “It feels to us like we have finally turned the corner from just a defensive strategy around COVID 19 to an offensive strategy, where we can actually prevent the disease. It may take months to do that, but it is really nice to get started with vaccinations.”
Nicki Britten, Health Officer, for the Berrien County Health Department, delivered more good news regarding the current status, with her update, saying, “There has been a bit of a downward trend in the number of confirmed cases over the last couple of weeks. It really started to go down just after Thanksgiving, and we were initially thinking that maybe it was just due to the slowdown in testing around Thanksgiving, however the trend has sustained for a couple of weeks now. We have seen a decrease in testing at the same time, so it can be a little difficult to tease out if it is because we have less testing finding less cases, or what is it.”
Britten clarifies, as well, “But, as we’ve been saying all along the number of confirmed cases is not the best, nor should it be the only, indicator of what’s going on. It is subject to the influence as testing strategies change, we know that access to tests, testing supplies, and how tests are available continues to shift over time.”
She then turned to the numbers, noting, “Right now we’re seeing about 100 new cases per day on average, whereas two weeks ago we were closer to 140 to 150 cases per day, with our peak at about 165, so we definitely have been coming down. What is not showing the same downward trend is the hospital census in the number of people who are hospitalized with COVID. In some ways that is a little bit better measure, if we’re only going to look at one thing to give an indication of what’s going on, our hospitalizations is the thing that is least influenced by testing strategy. If people are ill enough to need hospital level care, they will seek it, they will show up and we will see that.”
Looking at hospitalizations, Britten says, “We haven’t seen the same sort of downward trend. We’ve seen some leveling off, we haven’t seen as much rapid growth. A few weeks ago just before Thanksgiving Loren and I were here talking about some pretty serious concerns about the trajectory we were on. It does seem like we’ve shifted, and adjusted and we’re not on that same trajectory. We are by no means in a really good and comfortable place, though. We still are seeing ten-fold higher cases than we were at the beginning of October, and this is not the time to let our guard down, but there may be a bit of encouragement there.”
Dr. Hamel turned to the numbers as well, saying, “I certainly have been encouraged by the same trends that Nicki just described. We had a peak of COVID in-patient census of 85. We had a number of days in the mid-70s. We’ve run a couple of weeks now in the mid to high-60s, and so there has been a leveling off trend. Today, for the first time in several weeks, a census in the mid-50s. While one day in the mid-50s is not a trend, it is much better than seeing something in the 80s. The staff are working very hard to keep caring for people, not only everybody with COVID, but everybody else who is sick. Our facility has been full, but it is very encouraging to see that stable trend, and maybe some indication that it is not going to grow and might even decline a bit, we’ll just have to watch that over the next few days.”
The two then turned to strategies for vaccinations and priorities assigned to various groups and all of that information can be found at http://bchd.org
