COVID surging through county

Two years after the first case of COVID-19 was identified in Washington, Mason General Hospital is the lone facility in the county handling the medical treatment of hospitalized COVID patients.

With the omicron wave, Mason Health and Mason General Hospital is seeing more patients than ever. In August, Dr. Dean Gushee, Mason Health chief medical officer, said the hospital was bursting at the seams. He said little has changed since then.

“Early in the pandemic, we were seeing very occasional COVID-positive patients in our facility, but even then that had an impact because we had to begin cutting back some services like elective surgical procedures, for example, elective in-patient surgical procedures,” Gushee said. “Over time, what has happened, and I think the biggest impact for us is as the cases have climbed everywhere, COVID patients are occupying hospital beds. What that means is there are no hospital beds available for other patients who need things like elective surgical procedures. … we’re now in double digits almost every day with COVID patients.

“People see that and I know I’ve heard these comments as well, ‘Well then you’re not bursting at the seams with COVID patients, what’s the big deal?’ ” Gushee said. “The upshot is that they’re occupying beds everywhere which means that we have a really hard time transferring patients to tertiary centers for routine sorts of care … The impact isn’t that every bed in the hospital is filled with COVID patients, but it’s taken up all of the slack in the system, such that there’s nowhere to send patients who need routine care.”

Gushee said the virus that causes COVID will burn out and eventually mutate into something less lethal. The virus doesn’t want to kill everyone — it needs to reproduce and survive in the ecosystem so it will evolve into a less lethal strain.

He said omicron might be an indication of that because while it is more contagious, it is less lethal than the other COVID-19 mutations. With the vaccine, there was the possibility of reaching herd immunity, but with 62.8% of people in the U.S. fully vaccinated (Mason County is 55% fully vaccinated), the virus has had space to continue to mutate and spread, which puts the entire population at risk.

Mason County’s division of Emergency Management reported 990 cases and 13 deaths from Jan. 10 to Jan. 14, and reported 87 deaths on Tuesday. As of Tuesday’s report, the county’s 14-day case rate per 100,000 is 1,823.3 and there are 10 people hospitalized.

Gushee, who said he didn’t expect the pandemic to last this long, said as long as other countries have low vaccination rates, COVID will continue to produce variants.

“I said on the area command, we had a celebration at the one-year mark, we had a cake and everybody showed up and we had a cake thinking ‘OK, we’re about done with this,’ ” Gushee said. “We’ve still been meeting almost every day for two years now.”

A nurse’s view

Christina Lohmeyer, an intensive care unit nurse at Mason Health, had a scheduled four-day stretch off of work recently. She ended up working one of those days and received a text message every other day that she was off asking her whether she could come in.

The ICU has 10 beds and Mason General Hospital can have up to seven COVID patients that can have negative airflow. The ICU is experiencing an influx of patients without enough staff to care for everyone.

It takes time to put on protective gear to care for COVID patients.

“Every time you go in a room, it takes about five minutes to put on the gear and take it off. If you’re going in and out of rooms, plus once you’re in a room, you’re in there,” Lohmeyer said. “You have to have a staff member to run you items and we don’t necessarily have more staff to do that. In a typical day, I work 12-hour shifts, usually about 10 hours in isolation gear, and probably an hour taking it on and off.”

Nicole Eddins is the senior director of ancillary services and has been working on the vaccine rollout for Mason Health. She said the rollout has been a community effort and Mason Health has partnered with several local organizations, including the YMCA, to host vaccine clinics. The clinics are geared toward kids, with Dr. Suess’s The Grinch hosting a vaccine clinic before Christmas. The Cat in the Hat was the theme for the vaccine clinic Jan. 7 in which 345 vaccines were distributed, 100 more than at the first event.

“It definitely takes a village to take care of a village and that’s the best part of the vaccine project is every event we’ve done, we get plenty of volunteers and help. It’s a great way to bring the community together to take care of each other,” Eddins said. “The community is looking for protection, they’re looking for ways of getting the booster and we’re going to keep looking for ways of providing it. We are in the planning stages of doing another event, potentially at the Y. That’s a great spot for us because we have those three offices and a very large gym to keep everyone socially distanced.”

Eddins said she’s heard a spectrum of misinformation concerning COVID vaccines. She said it’s critical to keep making the vaccine available and to reduce the barriers to getting vaccinated in hopes more people decide to receive the vaccine.

Vaccination misinformation

“Those people who are vaccinated are not ones ending up in hospitals. It just almost doesn’t happen,” Gushee said. “It’s a tiny percentage, if you look at the state’s website data. The people who are landing in hospitals are people who are unvaccinated. Even though some breakthrough cases are occurring, and I’ll acknowledge a lot of breakthrough cases are occurring, the vaccine protects you, absolutely protects you, from becoming seriously ill and ending up in a hospital on a ventilator or dying, no question about it. That’s the misunderstanding I think with the whole pushback. And yes, it’s very politically charged, needless to say.”

Gushee said it’s frustrating when he hears misinformation. He said a friend told him he wasn’t going to get it because he didn’t want to be told to get it. He also sat down with a person who was scared to get the vaccine and spent an hour talking with the person about it. The person wanted to get vaccinated because it was required at her job, and Gushee was able to use his trust as her medical provider to convince her to get the vaccine. He said she’d only get it if he gave it to her.

“I told her that was probably the riskiest part of the entire conversation,” Gushee said. “I ended up vaccinating her. I’ve done a few vaccines on that basis that people only take it from me, not realizing that doctors don’t give shots. It’s remarkably frustrating and it’s hard to combat the misinformation that’s out there. People get their information from sources they trust and for whatever strange reason, we all live in our own little information bubble. We only hear from other people in that same information bubble and it’s very hard to penetrate that and gain trust.”

Gushee said he hopes people will contact Mason Health if they have questions about the virus or the vaccine because they will provide straight information.

At the beginning of the pandemic, healthcare workers on the frontline of the pandemic were often hailed as heroes. That has waned. Gushee said he has run into more hostility when it comes to COVID.

“Even when this started, when healthcare workers were the heroes, my thought was we’re not going to be invited to anyone’s barbecue,” ICU nurse Lohmeyer said. “They’re like, you go save lives and just stay away from us. My kids kind of suffered a little bit, friends wouldn’t invite them over, they knew I was working in the ICU. Globally, it’s been hard and you know, two years into it, it’s tough. You’re working extra, you kind of come to work and our workloads are much harder and then you go home and you have just bad days and you log in to Facebook and it’s life as usual for everybody else, but it doesn’t feel usual. You worked 12 ½ hours and stayed over because you haven’t charted a single thing all day and everybody else is enjoying things, it is hard. I feel appreciation from Mason General and I’m thankful that I work at Mason General and Mason Health. They’re a good place to work, the grass isn’t greener. They really do care about their employees.”

Although some healthcare workers have felt the strain and changed careers, Lohmeyer said she still loves what she does.

“I enjoy what I do and I love taking care of sick people. Maybe not the number of people we are, but I like what I do,” she said. “I was telling my kid the other day, she was like ‘Do you like when you go to work?’ and I said I love when I go to work. When I get there, I’m 100% there and I’m happy to be there.”

‘PTSD stuff’

Those working in healthcare can’t escape COVID, and it’s there when they leave work.

“I’m personally always worried about the team. I lose sleep at night over how almost morally damaged — this is PTSD stuff,” Mason Health Chief Nursing Officer Melissa Strong said. “How that long-term effect on their psyche is going to be. I’ve got goosebumps talking about it.”

Eddins said her daughter didn’t go to the last two birthday parties she was invited to because the birthday girl wasn’t vaccinated until recently.

“It’s a hard decision as a mother, but I also see what’s happening from inside so you know, you’ve got to protect your family,” Eddins said.

Looking ahead to 2022, Gushee said some data suggest that omicron’s lower lethality and higher contagion rate might increase collective immunity.

“The thought is it may provide protection against delta, but not vice versa, so some patients who got delta will get omicron, but patients who get omicron don’t seem to get delta,” Gushee said. “What that means is it may shut down that more lethal side as well as give people some degree of protection. Estimates are though, unfortunately, to get there, without additional vaccination, means we’ll have to kill another 85,000 to 100,000 people, which is a huge price to pay. But if that proves out and there isn’t a mutation out there that is more lethal and more contagious, then maybe this becomes sort of the light at the end of the tunnel.”

If he had to predict, Gushee said the country will see a peak of omicron in mid-February.

Ultimately, Gushee said COVID will become an endemic virus and it will require yearly booster shots. He said he thinks vaccine passports will become more prevalent, including some cities that have already implemented proof of vaccination to eat at restaurants or go certain places. He thinks air travel will ultimately go that route as well.

“Ultimately, (vaccinations) are the way we are going to get out of this and if we don’t encourage vaccinations at some point, then we do stay in this forever in some fashion,” Gushee said. “Masks may become a way of life. What we’ve seen, interestingly, is very low influenza rates around the country these past two years and it’s probably largely because people wear masks. I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes sort of a thing like it is in some Asian countries.”

This pandemic has affected all their lives, inside and outside work. Gushee said he enjoys traveling, but has had to find alternatives locally.

“I find it exhausting, to be honest with you. I’m at the point where it’s just completely exhausting,” Gushee said. “To your point, it’s tolerable, it just is what it is. I can deal with that, come to work every day and work with a great team of people who are doing the right stuff, but in the end, I find it exhausting. As things change, and we have to change, it’s very hard to just get in a groove and just include it day in and day out.”

Author Bio

Matt Baide, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
Email: [email protected]

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