THE END OF COVID-19 AS WE’VE KNOWN IT, (Maybe)
By Dr. Clayton Bunt
Since January of 2020 the entire world has been upended in many ways by the spread of the Covid -19 virus, starting in China and spreading to Europe, then to the US and on to pretty much the entire world.
Well over a million Americans have died, a US President who initially denied the seriousness of the pandemic but did push for the fastest possible vaccine saw the pandemic become a major reason for losing the election. Public Health requests for quarantines and masking became a major dividing line of the political spectrum. Even school policies and board meetings became flash points! The disruptions to employment have created a shortage of goods and services that has fueled inflation, which continues to affect the economy. Many people have chosen to modify their lives, limiting their work, moving to new areas and in general, reassessing their lives.
Our Healthcare system is reeling from sudden surges in need for inpatient capacity far beyond existing resources, followed by staff shortages as thousands of nurses, respiratory therapists, and other skilled workers have either quit their jobs, moved to new jobs they perceive as safer or lower in stress. Hospitals which initially responded by hiring traveling nurses and professionals to keep up with the surges in demand but now find that they cannot economically sustain the financial burden, since travelers simply cost more money to employ.
When hospitals cut back on staffing, there is a decrease in capacity. This has had an effect on the availability of specialty care for our sickest patients. Just as we experienced during the surges of Covid cases, we are again having difficulty finding intensive care or specialty beds at larger medical centers for patients who present here. Last week during one ER shift, we had to transfer patients to Idaho Falls and Boise because there were no available beds in Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Missoula, or Lewiston.
In almost 40 years of medicine, I have seen suffering, young people maimed or dead from trauma, held dead babies too premature to live, comforted families of the dead and dying, watched friends die rapidly from incurable cancers… The hardest thing I have had to do has been to look into the eyes of long-term patients and friends and watch them struggle to breath, knowing that their risk of death from Covid was almost a certainty. I do not want to ever do it again.
The levels of Covid cases have stabilized at lower levels than during the heat of the pandemic, but have certainly not gone away. Hopefully, higher levels of immunity in the population whether from past infection or immunization will help to keep the number of infections manageable. However, it would be a mistake to think Covid is going away in any of our lifetimes. There is a new vaccine booster (Bivalent) which focuses on both the virus shell, and also the “spike Protein” which has been a rapidly mutating target. I hope you will all consider getting a vaccine booster.