Omicron sends Valley residents to seek care and COVID-19 tests. Patience is required for both
Mahoning Valley social media posts and reports shared with Mahoning Matters indicated the Christmas holiday weekend was a busy time for hospital emergency rooms and immediate care clinics.
Part of the clinic traffic was blamed on COVID-19 illnesses as the omicron variant makes its presence felt in the Valley. Another part was owed to a new burgeoning problem: the scarcity of coronavirus testing.
Mercy Health’s Chief Clinical Officer Dr. James Kravec confirmed to Mahoning Matters that wait times in Valley ERs “were longer than what normally happens” this past weekend.
“We’ve been seeing this actually, to be honest, for about a month now of having a lot of patients in the [emergency room] and longer wait times, so [we’re] just trying to get the message out of when to go to the emergency room versus a walk-in care,” Kravec said.
Specifically this past weekend, “[We were] seeing a long wait for a lot of patients in our emergency rooms, urgent and walk-in cares … They’re at varying degrees of illness. … Some are very sick and some are with mild illnesses and some are for testing, so it’s really a wide range of issues,” Kravec said.
He said multiple conversations are happening across hospitals to adjust staffing to meet capacity needs.
“I spent most of [Monday] working with our walk-in care, staff and our leaders there to make sure that we can adjust staffing to manage volumes,” he said.
Kravec said holiday weekends are usually more rampant with emergency room and walk-in clinic patients waiting to get treated.
“Sometimes we see the day before and the day after the holiday, people kind of staying home day after day. … people try to tough [the illness] out for an extra day to get through Christmas,” he said.
Stay home or go get checked?
If patients have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic, Kravec said to perform an at-home COVID-19 test or visit a walk-in clinic for testing, instead of flooding emergency rooms.
“There are some people still coming to the emergency department who have mild illnesses or just to be tested,” he said. “Either do the at-home test if you have availability or present to a walk-in care for mild illnesses.”
Youngstown City Health District Health Commissioner Erin Bishop also urged patients to avoid heading to emergency rooms unless necessary.
“They really should stay home, and take over the counter medicine. Unless they have trouble breathing, but if it’s a sniffle. … Dry cough or headache they’re really telling you to stay out of the [emergency rooms],” she said.
The problem in the Valley right now, is that getting tested for COVID-19 is difficult. Patients can’t easily get appointments through popular pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.
Bishop has one solution: The Youngstown City Health District is hosting a free at-home test kit giveaway on Wednesday.
Bishop said COVID-19 test kits will be distributed in the parking lot of the Covelli Centre starting at 8 a.m. on Wednesday.
“We did move that to the Covelli Centre just because of the high demand last week,” Bishop told Mahoning Matters. “We’re going to do the first 1,000 cars, and they could get up to four per car.”
Record set for positivity
The reason for the uptick in those seeking care? On Monday, the Ohio Department of Health reported the average seven-day rate of positive coronavirus tests in Ohio jumped to 24.2% — the highest it’s been since the beginning of the pandemic. The state’s previous all-time high was 23.6% on April 20, 2020, amid COVID-19’s first wave.
Monday’s rate is more than 15 times higher than the all-time low of 1.3 percent reported in late June. Valley counties’ average positivity rates are now all below the state’s average.
As of Friday, 92% of cases statewide were reported as the omicron variant, Kravec said citing statewide Ohio Department of Health data.
“The absolute amount of variants that we have is omicron,” he said. “We are hopeful that these become milder, but they’re also much more contagious. Based on information from South Africa and Great Britain, kind of anecdotal here, the severity seems to be a little bit lighter.”
Monday’s ODH data includes 303 new cases in the Mahoning Valley: 138 new cases in Mahoning County (for a total of 39,700), 131 in Trumbull (30,864) and 34 in Columbiana (18,533).
There were 211 new COVID-19 hospitalizations and 15 new ICU admissions reported statewide.
The state last week surpassed 1.8 million total cases since the beginning of the pandemic and on Tuesday, Dec. 21, surpassed 28,000 total deaths.
‘Worse before it gets better’
The top U.S. infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned Monday that with omicron, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” and he said authorities should seriously consider requiring that domestic airline passengers be vaccinated.
In a decision driven by the recent surge in COVID-19 cases, U.S. health officials on Monday cut isolation restrictions for Americans who catch the coronavirus from 10 to five days, and similarly shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said the guidance is in keeping with growing evidence that people with the coronavirus are most infectious in the two days before and three days after symptoms develop.
Help you can find this week
If all the news has spurred you to finally consider a COVID-19 vaccination, the Trumbull County Combined Health District will host a COVID-19 vaccination clinic from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at Eastwood Mall.
The clinic will be at the former Lane Bryant space near Center Court, next to Pandora and across from Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines will be available at the clinic.
To register for an appointment, click here and bring the confirmation email or text to the appointment.
If you are in less of a hurry, Mahoning County Public Health will dispense Moderna booster vaccines at the Austintown Senior Center, 112 Westchester Drive on Friday, Jan. 7 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., It will be closed for lunch from noon to 1 p.m.
Click here to make your appointment — which is required. If you are unable to schedule an appointment online, call 330-270-2855, extension 185.
Those getting vaccinated must bring their identification and their vaccination card to the appointment.
Guard not coming to Mercy
Ohio National Guard members were to assist Mercy Health hospitals in Youngstown and Warren this week with the surge of new COVID-19 hospitalizations, Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff announced Wednesday.
However, plans changed and guard members will not assist staff at the Mercy Health in Youngstown, ODH told Mahoning Matters.
“The Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Hospital Association are working daily with Ohio hospitals to assess staffing needs to determine the most appropriate support from the Ohio National Guard,” Alicia Shoults, spokesperson for ODH, said in response to a Mahoning Matters query. “Hospitalizations for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients change every day and staffing adjustments will be made accordingly.”
“We’ve managed during the pandemic, and we take our responsibility very seriously as far as taking care for our community,” Kravec said. “We can, [and] will continue to do that.”