Investigator: McLaren Oakland site of first COVID death in county
Doctor shares the intensity of pandemic’s start
McLaren Oakland was the site of the first COVID-related death in Oakland County — and one of the first three in the state — on March 19, 2020.
Dr. Frank Rosenblat, an infectious disease specialist at the Pontiac hospital, wasn’t on the case from the beginning but was called in when the patient passed.
“They wanted to make sense out of what to do next now that we had one case,’’ Rosenblat said.
“That death for me, it was kind of a herald of bad things to come. It was kind of a starting point for the whole thing. I had this feeling at that point that we were in for something much different than we’d usually been experiencing,’’ he added.
Within a week or so young and old patients who were quite ill showed up at the Pontiac hospital daily and many were put on ventilators quickly.
“The ICU filled up pretty quickly. You could definitely see it was an epidemic at that point,’’ Rosenblat said. “Sometimes our ICU will be full, sometimes it will be half empty but I’d never seen it where all of a sudden it fills up and they keep on coming. It was something new.’’
The coronavirus was so new that there was no set treatment protocol.
“We did the best we could with a regular standard of care for treating patients in respiratory failure. We took our cues as far as other treatment from things being reported from other countries that had already had experience.
“We used Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin and later on we found those were useless for treatment of COVID. We didn’t have any established guidance. We were treating people on what had been experience from China before it hit the United States,’’ the doctor said.
Rosenblat, 58, said he saw every COVID patient that came through McLaren Oakland and was fortunate to never catch it.
“At the very beginning, which was in March, I thought my chances of catching it were very good, I was trying not to lose my nerve about that early on,’’ Rosenblat said.
“Not only that it was very unnerving where you would have patients in their 40s and 50s and dying of this infection and obviously we were seeing the worst of the worst. We saw people of all age groups dying from it. I saw people my age that were affected, going on ventilators and dying that was pretty unnerving,’’ Rosenblat added.
He called the whole year scary and exhausting.
Now, however, with the cases dropping and the vaccine getting in more arms, he has a sense of hope.
“We’re down to a very slow trickle at this point. I think that mirrors what the rest of the country is experiencing. We’ve been through this once where we had a falloff in May of last year and everything was quiet until November. For us the second wave was worse than the first one,’’ Rosenblat said.
“I’m very hopeful that that’s not going to happen again now that the vaccine is being distributed in large numbers. It can always spike again, my hopes aren’t 100 percent but now that the vaccine is out there I’m breathing a much greater sigh of relief than I would have,’’ he added.
He cited studies out of Scotland and the United Kingdom on the vaccine’s impact.
“They are showing their numbers of hospitalizations from COVID have dropped off considerably which is traceable to the amount of vaccine that’s already been released there,’’ Rosenblat said. “All of a sudden, we’ve got real data that the vaccine cuts down on severe illness in a country’s population. I’m hoping we have the same experience here.’’