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The Midwest is the
epicenter of yet a third wave of suffering as the
coronavirus continues its mortal march throughout the United
States. Since January 2020, Covid-19 has stricken more than
12 million people, killing over 255,000 individuals. Last
week, the single-day death toll exceeded 2,000 for the first
time, straining an already overwhelmed healthcare system.
According to figures
released late last week, Ohio has reported over 326,000
cases, 24,000 hospitalizations, and 5,900 total deaths,
prompting Governor Mike DeWine to sign a health order
encouraging Ohioans to stay home.
I spoke with Eric
Zgodzinski, Toledo-Lucas County Health Commissioner, as the
deadly virus threatens to overrun the nation and its
healthcare system.
Perryman: You and I talked
about COVID-19 back in February or March. What’s changed in
the last nine months?
Zgodzinski: What’s changed
is you’ve seen the cyclic pattern of this disease. Early on,
we were all shut down and locked in our homes and
experienced a disease spike. We then saw another wave in
July, and now you’re seeing another wave right now. This
disease is taking its course of what it wants to do. It is
controlling us right now because of the number of infections
we see daily, which is significant. We have to make sure
that we do everything possible to stop the tide.
Perryman: According to the
website, COVID Act Now, Lucas County is experiencing 259 new
cases per day, which is 30th of Ohio’s 88
counties. Our positive test rate of 14.6 percent indicates
insufficient testing. However, the good news is that our
intensive care headroom use is only 24 percent of capacity.
It appears we could handle a new wave of COVID, at least for
the time being.
Zgodzinski: You make a
really good point in looking at the hospital numbers because
that’s what we’re trying to do right now. We’re attempting
to protect the hospitals, and we do that by trying to
decrease those cases. The problem with this disease is that
it loves to lag behind, so we get cases that may not have
that big of an issue to symptoms right now. Still, as those
cases grow, it impacts our hospitals and ICUs.
Unfortunately, you then probably see fatalities that come
out of that. Yes, we do have some capacity, but I would
caution that capacity could diminish very quickly.
Perryman: We’re just coming
into the holidays. With the lag, there could be an uptick in
deaths around January or February?
Zgodzinski: Yes, there very
much could. We’ve seen this at each one of our holidays. We
saw a big concern after the 4th of July. Everybody was
really COVID fatigued at that point in time. They wanted to
get out and they did and we saw significant issues
afterward. Even Halloween, we saw issues, not from trick or
treating, but because it was from us getting out and maybe
going to parties or visiting with people. We saw the
ramifications there. So, we’re going to see similar spikes
or even worse after Thanksgiving and the other holidays if
we don’t curtail our behaviors. This next month and a half
will be very crucial to what happens in January and
February.
Perryman: Do we need to do
anything else from a public policy stance?
Zgodzinski: You’ve seen
different states take different policy avenues. Here in
Ohio, we did the shutdown early on, and the governor just
attempted a slowdown. I think that’s good, but we need to
make sure that we monitor that slowdown. Is it actually
working, and my concern is if it doesn’t work, where do we
go from here?
The idea of another
shutdown - our residents need to be employed to make money
so they can pay bills, buy food, and address mental health
issues. Those are all things that are coupled with going to
work, going to school, and doing other things. I hope we
don’t have to get to the point where we have to curtail
those things. It all depends on how we act over the next of
couple weeks, so we don’t have to take any additional
policies.
Perryman: Do we save lives
or save jobs? What a difficult decision.
Zgodzinski: You make a good
point there. Saving lives is extremely important. I had the
discussion today. In public health, our job is to make sure
that we try to have zero disease in the community. That’s
what we work for. We know we can never get there, but
whether it is COVID or measles or heart disease, what we
want to do is make sure that it doesn’t happen in our
community.
The idea here, too, is
what do you do? Livelihoods and jobs and being able to pay
for housing and things of that nature, that’s important.
You have to look at the cascading effects of what’s
happening when you can’t have a paycheck coming in, so
that’s really important. But yes, on the flip side is how
many lives can we save by doing x, y or z policy.
Perryman: What are your
recommendations on holding church services, weddings, and
funerals?
Zgodzinski: Church is
essential to many of us in this community, and that is
another fine line that we have to walk. It’s up to the
different churches how they are going to handle in-person,
Zoom, or drive-up services. If you’re going to go to church,
you have to make sure that you’re doing the right things by
wearing face coverings and staying away from each other. We
know that the virus increases in an enclosed facility, so
there are some things that we need to do differently.
We do see very significant
cases and outbreaks coming out of weddings and funerals
sometimes. It’s not so much the funeral or the wedding
itself; it’s the social activities afterward. This disease
loves to be where there are groups of people. It’s easy to
jump from person to person, so the closer we are and the
more we’re together, the more this disease likes it.
Wearing a face covering is
not a lot of fun, but when you start to interact with
individuals, you should have that on. Staying six feet
apart is another thing. If you’re wearing a mask, I’m
wearing a mask, and we’re staying six feet apart, there is
minimal risk to catching COVID.
The other thing, too, is
hand hygiene is so important. Hand sanitizer, washing
hands, that really does take any of the virus or even the
flu virus off our hands so that we’re not introducing it
into our bodies.
The other thing that we
often forget is the large group actions. We feel
comfortable going to somebody’s backyard because they’re our
friends, but do you know where they’ve been? Do you know
who they’ve interacted with? So yeah, you may be good
friends, but they’re going to work where they just had a
large outbreak. You didn’t know that, and now you’re with
them and not taking any precautions, which then leads to
spreading the infection. So, especially for right now, we
need to make sure that our bubble stays intact so we’re with
our family units. We’re not trying to bring bubbles
together.
Perryman: Do you have
recommendations for parents who might have kids away at
college but coming home for the holidays?
Zgodzinski: If you’re
bringing your daughter or son home from college, you want to
make sure that they weren’t exposed, but also bringing them
into your bubble, you should do some other things. I have
some friends that said they’re bringing their daughter home,
and they’re going to make sure that they mask up and stay
socially distanced to make sure that there are no issues.
That’s fine too; however we feel comfortable.
Perryman: How is the supply
of PPE in Lucas County?
Zgodzinski: We’re not hearing
of significant supply issues with any PPE, including N95
masks, gowns, gloves, things of that nature at this time,
but there’s a burn rate to those. The more people we get in
the hospitals, the more people we have to use PPE on. So
that’s another reason why protecting the hospitals is
critical. We need to make sure that we have enough PPE for
healthcare workers to respond so that they’re not getting
sick.
Perryman: We expect a
vaccine to be distributed very soon. Do you trust the
vaccine, and what plans are in place to get it distributed
efficiently?
Zgodzinski: The one good
thing about the vaccine that’s coming is that we’ve already
done this once before with H1-N1. We previously did a mass
vaccination campaign in Lucas County and Ohio, so we’ve
learned a lot. We’ve been planning for a couple of months
actually to get the vaccine and what to do to get it out to
the public. Mercy Health is one of the entities here in the
community to lead the charge with storage of the vaccine and
pushing it out. So, those foundations are laid.
The vaccines are 95+
effective, which is really good to hear and safety-wise.
From my standpoint, it is safe. If they said okay, who
wants to be first? I would have myself and my family be
first. That’s how much I would trust the vaccine.
Perryman: For recipients,
what is the priority for who gets vaccinated?
Zgodzinski: Not
everybody’s going to be able to get this if it comes out in
December because we’re not pushing out hundreds of millions
of doses at a time for the United States. So, we’re going
to receive ‘x’ amount of doses, and then those are going to
be given to the most critical. Whether it’s the hospital,
hospital personnel, long term care facilities, first
responders, that plan is being worked on.
Perryman: If hospital
personnel and first responders, long term care facilities
would be in the first tier, who would be next?
Zgodzinski: We don’t have an
answer on that yet. We’re surmising, the next tier could be
other critical individuals, depending on how much vaccine we
have out. I would expect by that time we would start moving
that out to other portions of the population, maybe it’s the
65 and older individuals and then perhaps school-aged
children. It all depends on how much we get out and then
who we can get vaccinated first.
The big question is when
we will get enough to push it out to the community so that
we can get enough people vaccinated so that this time next
year we’re not talking about COVID-19 as we are right now.
The quicker we get it out, the more people we get
vaccinated, then the faster we can get to the point where
COVID-19 isn’t being passed from person to person. That’s
what we want to get to.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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