Faces of the Fight: Dr. Jason Gatzke, Swift Current
Dr. Jason Gatzke, Department Lead-emergency Medicine, South West, Saskatchewan Health Authority
Saskatchewan is entering the worst phase of the pandemic right now. The COVID-19 variants are causing sickness and hospitalization in a younger age group than what we have seen thus far. Three things can help us get through this:
1. public health measures (including masks, social distancing and limiting travel),
2. a robust vaccination program, and 3. wide-spread testing. Let’s talk testing. Testing identifies people who need timely care for COVID-19 and gets them to treatment sooner. Finding positive cases in asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic people will interrupt the spread of COVID-19 and keep others safe.
Here are a couple of misconceptions regarding testing:
1. “Low case numbers are always a good thing.” I hear over and over that in Southwest Saskatchewan, we are doing well because of low reported case numbers. We need to consider the amount of testing. In general, our testing numbers in Southwest Saskatchewan are very low. These low testing numbers mean that we aren’t doing enough tests to have a clear idea about our true COVID-19 situation. Our emergency room has been admitting people to hospital with COVID-19 since last June. Statistically, for every COVID-19 hospital admission, there are dozens of undiagnosed cases circulating. Without wide-spread testing, we know that these cases are in the community, but we don’t know where, so we aren’t able to prevent people from spreading COVID.
2. “Less testing = less cases = less restrictions.” Less testing contributes to more spread of the virus, which leads to more illness and ultimately more restrictions. People may attribute their symptoms to a cold or allergies or just feeling run down and use this as a justification for not getting tested. By not isolating with these symptoms, they can unknowingly continue spreading it. In my experience, people try to ignore their symptoms to avoid getting tested and having to deal with isolation protocols when they test positive. This creates an extremely dangerous situation for both the patient and all those that they may encounter. They may deny they have COVID-19 until they cannot stay home any longer. When they come into the hospital ER, they are often extremely ill. Early and frequent testing can help patients receive prompt treatment and significantly reduce the community spread of COVID-19.
Get tested if you have any symptoms.
Get tested if you are a close contact of a COVID -19 patient or have travelled.
Get tested if a pop-up clinic comes to your community.
Encourage your kids to get tested at school when this becomes available.
Encourage testing for employees at your business and support them if they need time off.
The time is now.
We need to slow the spread of COVID-19 and buy our province time to get more people vaccinated so we can get to the other side of this.