AFTER TOUGH WINTER, VACCINES SPARK HOPE
COVID-19 pounded a small hospital in Fayette County — in December alone claiming more than threequarters of the total lives lost to the virus in the county since the pandemic struck in March 2020.
Doctors and nurses pushed back hard.
Three months later, the hospital’s intensive care unit is hushed. The second floor — where two holes were knocked into an outside wall so big blowers on wheels could pump fresh air into a COVID-19 red zone for patients — is again open to visitors. And the visitors’ elevator is stopping again on that floor, which it had bypassed during the peak of the outbreak to curb the spread of the disease.
A lot has changed since December, with three vaccines getting emergency government authorization and Uniontown Hospital inoculating more than 10,000 people at big public clinics. The shots promise to reduce the risk of spreading the virus while tamping down the possibility of new, potentially more deadly coronavirus variants emerging.
“Our vaccine data is still really good, even with variants of the virus,” said Dr. Daniel Griffin, physician-scientist and infectious disease specialist at Columbia University in New York.
“They’re 100% effective at preventing death. The sky is falling; another huge wave is coming — I think that’s alarmist. I don’t think the data supports that.”
Not everyone shares Dr. Griffin’s optimism. Worry continues in Uniontown about whether the staff would be strong enough to beat back a next wave — one that many experts are predicting — of a disease that kills four of every five people who become seriously ill.
The devastation of 2020 is still vivid to many at the hospital.
“Cardiac arrest after cardiac arrest after cardiac arrest,” recalled
intensive care unit charge nurse Michelle Weaver, 48. “People dying every day, the unit full every day — I took that home every night. I don’t think the staff could tolerate that again.”
As mask mandates are lifted in Texas and other states and as U.S. COVID-19 case counts flatten, Uniontown Hospital critical care physician Dr. Anas Wardeh worries.
The disease is still here, he said.The deaths continue.
“The battle is ongoing,” said Dr. Wardeh, 55, who oversees the ICU. “Nothing can stop it. We’re fighting againstthe odds.”
Last year was the deadliest year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 killing 400,000 people. The fatalities were approaching 550,000 last week as more contagious, more lethal variants pop up.
At Uniontown Hospital, the prospect of a surge fueled by new strains brings with it the threat of new psychic wounds for caregivers.
Triage, the only guide
The Uniontown Hospital ICU had no crisis guidelines for medical care, no policies to follow as every bed filled with COVID-19 patients in December — just the age-old principles of triage, which steer medical care and equipment to the sickest, those with the most urgent needs.
Every day, families would call the ICU for updates on their loved ones, unaware doctors and nurses were racing room to room to shock a patient’s heart back to beating or insert a tube into the lungs to increase the oxygen in their bloodstream. An average of five people died every day in December, mostly inthe ICU.
Uniontown Hospital President David Hess, whose mother was a nurse, worries about the emotional toll on caregivers forced to deal with somuch death.
Distraught families, who weren’t allowed in the hospital due to COVID-19 restrictions, sometimes asked nurses to pray with their lovedones.
Even now, during an uneasy pause in the outbreak, the crisis created by COVID19 is still too fresh for executives at WVU Medicine, which manages the hospital, to have fully thought through how the virus will change the practice of medicine.
That’s because hospitals plan for the pileup out on the interstate involving a bus full of tourists, the paralyzing snowstorm, power outages. Hospitals haven’t worried much about things forecast to happenin the next 500 years.
COVID-19 may change that.
“We were prepared for the 100-year flood but not the 500year flood,” said WVU Medicine President and CEO Albert Wright, who oversees a 15-hospital system including the 135-bed Uniontown Hospital. “We underestimated how widespread the community spread was going to be. In some ways, these were things we never imagined. What this feels like to me is a 500-year flood.”
Hospitals were not ready for the sustained assault COVID-19 mounted — the handful of new infections every day in Fayette County that grew to a flood of contagious patients clogging the hospital by December.
A total of 141 people would not survive the month — 82% of the total number of COVID-19 deaths in Fayette County in 2020.
“All hell broke loose in the fall,” said Dr. Stephen Hoffmann, a critical care physician who has been guiding WVU Medicine’s response to COVID-19. “We had never seena death rate like that.”
Virus defeated? Or just stalled?
WVU Medicine executives believe the vaccination campaign underway in Fayette County will head off a new wave of infections. Many experts agree, including Dr. Griffin, of Columbia University.
Others see blinking red lights.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in January warned of the potential impact of a COVID-19
variant called B.1.1.7 that spreads more easily than existing strains.
“A higher rate of transmission will lead to more cases, increasing the number of persons overall who need clinical care, exacerbating the burden on an alreadystrained health care system and resulting in more deaths, ”the study found.
A U.K. study published March 10 in the British Medical Journal found the variant was between 30% and 100% more deadly than existing strains.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and other researchers sounded a similar alarm in a February report, saying the B.1.1.7 infections could push COVID-19 hospitalizations as much as 45% higher than the U.S. record of 132,474, set Jan. 7.
“We’re definitely going to benefit from vaccination, but at this point, the vaccination rates are still low,” Mr. Osterholm said.
As of last week, only about 14% of the U.S. population had been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC, far short of the 70% or so needed for the country to achieve public safety from the disease.
“This is coming,” Mr. Osterholm said. “How bad it will be is still unclear, but you can see what happened in Europe,” where cases of the variant, first identified in September, were doubling every 10 days, increasing hospital admissions and prompting government lockdowns on businesses in January.
“Please hear me clearly,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walen sky said at a briefing in early March. “At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. These variants are a very real threat to our people and our progress.”
Talking to families
At Uniontown Hospital during the peak of the surge, conversations with families were constant and difficult. The ICU staff didn’t always know each patient as a person, but they got to know the sons, daughters, spouses.
Victoria George, 58, kept a log of every conversation she had with Dr. Wardeh and the ICU nurses when her mother was in the unit in December. The ICU, like most of the hospital, was closed to visitors, but she called every day — getting to know each by name.
“Your mom’s very sick,” the nurses would tell her.
Ms. George’s mother, Frances Pierce, had not been feeling well in the weeks before she began baking her Christmas chocolate chip cookies, nut rolls and lady locks in early December. Ms. Pierce had married at age 15 before having the first of six children a year later with John, her husband of 59 years. She finally called her daughter to say she couldn’t breathe and needed an ambulance.
“They told me I tested positive for COVID-19,” she told her daughter, who lives 3 miles away.
The holiday season passed for Ms. Pierce — who raised her family in a frame house built by a coal company for miners — with her still hospitalized.
When she became too weak to talk, an ICU nurse used Ms. Pierce’s phone to
text her daughter, telling her that her mother wanted her to know she loved her. Three churches remembered Ms. Pierce in prayer chains.
Later, Dr. Wardeh, who tells families he’s always available to talk, called with badnews.
“He said she’s a very sick lady,” Ms. George said. “‘I don’t want to make this phone call, but I don’t think your mother is going to be here much longer. We’re going to tryto make her better.’ ”
“I knew we were losing our mother,” she said.
Ms. Pierce, 77, grandmother to 16 and great-grand mother to eight, died Dec. 27 in the ICU with festive green shamrocks decorating her fingernails instead of the Christmas tree decals she’d thought she’d picked for the approaching holiday. Her family never told her otherwise.
At a church reception following the funeral, the Christmascookies Ms. Pierce had baked were served.
Not over yet
Uniontown Hospital’s ICU was a very different place the first week of March than it was the month of December. Back then, COVID-19- infected patients filled the halls, administrators weighed options for an overflow morgue and 40 to 50 hospital staff members were off work after being exposed to or infected bythe disease.
Nationwide, too, pressure was easing as spring approached, with 91,206 fewer new cases on March 9 than the 226,148 new cases Dec. 31, a 40% decline. But the signals were different in Pennsylvania, where the week to week change in the number of new cases reached 1,380 more cases by March 18, including an increase of 31 in Fayette County. Testing positivity rates were ticking upward again, too, after a lull, and so were COVID-19 hospitalizations.
For Uniontown ICU charge nurse Michelle Weaver, the anxiety never went away.
The winter surge in COVID-19 cases was the worst experience of her 25year nursing career; 12-hour shifts spilled over into 13-, 14-, 15-hour shifts as the deaths mounted and counselors were called to comfort nurses, she said.
“Once we got hit, it was nonstop. That’s the oath you take as a nurse. It’s not always pretty,” said Ms. Weaver, who remembers a COVID-19 -infected man in his 80s calling his children from his ICU bed, telling each of them he was going to die that day, which he did. Ms. Weaver stayed with himfor two hours.
“I don’t want anyone to die by themselves,” she added. “That’s my biggest fear.”
The surge in cases didn’t break the staff, though; ICU nurses cried with patients and families. None walked away from the profession afterthe harrowing month, Ms. Weaver said.
The thing that hasn’t changed since December is the the tough conversations with families.
On an early March afternoon, when winter cold gave way to cool sunshine, Dr. Wardeh was on the phone with the family of a 66-yearold woman who had COVID19 — one of just three people with the disease in a 15-bed unit that had been filled with patients in December.
The woman’s odds of surviving were fading — a hole had developed in one of her lungs, leaking air, which often happens to people being treated for COVID-19 with high-flow oxygen delivered through a mask.
“We are really very close to putting her on a ventilator,” he told the family member. “If we do, her survival rate would be 20%; that’s it. There’s no way she could survive at home.”
He paused to listen, then added, “Let me see what I can do, and I’ll do my best.”
Joined by nurses, Dr. Wardeh quickly slipped on a gas mask-like device and other protective gear and swept into the patient’s room. Twenty minutes later, she was breathing easier, but the aid was temporary. The threat to her life remained.
‘COVID is here to stay’
So many questions remain about COVID-19 that the likelihood of another storm is not fully understood, Dr. Wardeh said. Will the vaccines provide protection for six months? Three months? Will mask wearing in public and social distancing measures continue? Heshrugs.
In any case, “vaccines won’t help my patients,” he said. “We need more therapeutics,” medicines to treat people who are already sick with the disease.
For those who are not sick, there is vaccination, he said.
“Guarantee yourself that, at any price, you won’t end up in the ICU,” Dr. Wardeh said. “A lot of people still don’t get it: COVID is here to stay. It’s not leaving.”