Doctors are best trusted source
Growing up, my sister and I gave my parents quite a few scares. The road to our pediatrician’s office was well worn. We had the Peanuts themed wallpaper in the waiting room memorized. Broken arms, electrical shocks, twisted ankles, horse tramplings, the measles — a breakthrough case — filled the spans between routine visits.
All of these were received with a calm and reassuring prognosis, while bouts of the more common ailments were handled with the ever-ready, “there’s a bug going around the schools just like this. Lasts about 48 hours.”
There is no shortage of information about COVID-19, but this reassuring presence is what is missing. Instead, the flood of information pouring in from all sides has made it all too easy to stumble upon loud soundbites or re-posted articles that wrap thin slices of the truth in heavy layers of conjecture.
Even though there are so many sources of information competing for our attention, it is not too hard to find the ones that we can trust. Not that long ago, when we had a medical question we turned to our doctors. So rather than reaching for a keyboard or television remote, listen to what your local doctors are saying about COVID-19.
That is why I reached out to Dr. Charles Catania — a doctor right here in our community who has been on the front lines since the pandemic started — and asked him to co-write this week’s column. Here is what the doctor tells me:
First, it is time to stop fighting about masks. We all know that the virus is too small for all but the highest-grade masks to completely filter, and that ordinary masks may not necessarily prevent you from getting COVID, but they do minimize the spread of the aerosol droplets that carry the virus. Minimizing aerosols in the environment minimizes transmission. Even vaccinated people should be wearing masks in large crowds and indoor venues. It is one layer in a multi-layered approach, but it is an important layer, and one you do to protect others.
Second, if you are eligible, get the vaccine. While it appears to have been developed quickly, it was developed on science that had been evolving over the last two decades. It has been tested, deployed, thoroughly studied, and it is incredibly effective. So far over six billion doses have been administered worldwide and they have definitively reduced the spread, hospitalization, and mortality rates of the virus. The risk of an unvaccinated person being hospitalized with COVID is about 1 in 700, whereas the risk for a vaccinated person is 1 in nearly 300,000. The risk of dying from COVID in America is about one in 477, the risk of serious health problems from the vaccine is below 1 in 50,000.
This vaccine can save tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars while also reducing the caseloads in hospitals where medical staffing has become an increasingly large problem.
The importance of the vaccine lies not only in protecting the individual, but in reducing the opportunities the virus has to replicate. Vaccinated people are able to fight off the virus much more quickly and carry about one one-thousandth the number of copies of the virus in their respiratory tract. Reducing the amount of virus not only reduces the spread, but also reduces the opportunities it will have to mutate. The more unvaccinated people we have, the greater the risk of a new variant developing.
The vaccine is a critical layer in a strategy to fight this virus, and is one that protects you and others.
In the past you have always turned to your doctor for advice on your health. Your health is their passion and their job. It is what they have always done for you.
Even patients who have had trouble believing in masks, the vaccine, or the severity of this disease have found themselves seeking their physician’s advice once they become infected. That trust that we have is built upon years of working together and understanding each other.
If you have questions about whether you should get tested, whether you should have your child vaccinated, whether masks really help, you should turn to the one source you have always relied on, your doctor.