As a physician I only stopped seeing my patients for two weeks during the pandemic. Why? I considered my patients cancer care a necessary demand. My cancer patients needed surgical procedures and the hospital didn’t consider those procedures urgent. So, I offered to do their surgical procedures in my office surgical suite under local anesthesia. If I didn’t the tumors would continue to grow and possibly metastasize or spread reducing their chances for cure. This brings up the important consideration that this pandemic is allowing our regular medical and surgical patient to result in delayed diagnoses and treatment. Victor Garcia reported that the Coronavirus lockdowns may be “killing” just as many people as the virus because as I mentioned, many people with serious conditions unrelated to the virus have been skipping treatment, Hoover Institution senior fellow Dr. Scott Atlas said Saturday on “Fox Report.”

“I think one thing that’s not somehow receiving attention is the CDC just came out with their fatality rates,” Atlas said. “And lo and behold, they verify what people have been saying for over a month now, including my Stanford epidemiology colleagues and everyone else in the world who’s done this analysis — and that is that the infection fatality rate is less than one-tenth of the original estimate.”

Even White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci is acknowledging the harm caused by the lockdown, Atlas said. “The policy itself is killing people. I mean, I think everyone’s heard about 650,000 people on cancer, chemo, half of whom didn’t come in. Two thirds of cancer screenings didn’t come in. 40 percent of stroke patients urgently needing care didn’t come in,” Atlas said. “And now we have over half the people, children in the United States not getting vaccinations. This is really what [Fauci] said was irreparable harm.”

More on Dr. Fauci later in this post.

“And I and my colleagues from other institutions have calculated the cost of the lockdown in terms of lives lost,” Atlas said. “Every month is about equal to the entire cost of lives lost during the COVID infection itself. This is a tragic, misguided public policy to extend this lockdown, whether or not it was justifiable in the beginning.”

Many states are currently reopening their economies slowly, while a few have pledged to extend the lockdowns through the summer.

The doctor also argued against keeping children out of schools, saying there’s no reason they can’t go back. “There’s no science whatsoever to keep K-through-12 schools closed, nor to have masks or social distancing on children, nor to keep summer programs closed,” Atlas said. “What we know now is that the risk of death and the risk of even a serious illness is nearly zero in people under 18.”

Lockdown measures have kept nearly 80 million children from receiving preventive vaccines

Caitlin McFall of Fox News reported that the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in stay-at-home orders that are putting young children at risk of contracting measles, polio and diphtheria, according to a report released Friday by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Routine childhood immunizations in at least 68 countries have been put on hold due to the unprecedented spread of COVID-19 worldwide, making children under the age of one more vulnerable.

More than half of 129 counties, where immunization data was readily available, reported moderate, severe or total suspensions of vaccinations during March and April.

“Immunization is one of the most powerful and fundamental disease prevention tools in the history of public health,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Disruption to immunization programs from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to unwind decades of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.”

The WHO has reported the reasons for reduced immunization rates vary. Some parents are afraid to leave the house due to travel restrictions relating to the coronavirus, whereas a lack of information regarding the importance of immunization remains a problem in some places.

Health workers are also less available because of COVID-19 restrictions.

The Sabin Vaccine Institute, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance also contributed to the report.

Experts are worried that worldwide immunization rates, which have progressed since the 1970s, are now being threatened.

“More children in more countries are now protected against more vaccine-preventable diseases than at any point in history,” said Gavi CEO Dr. Seth Berkley. “Due to COVID-19 this immense progress is now under threat.”

UNICEF has also reported a delay in vaccine deliveries because of coronavirus restrictions and is now “appealing to governments, the private sector, the airline industry, and others, to free up freight space at an affordable cost for these life-saving vaccines.”

Experts say that children need to receive their vaccines by the age of 2. And in the case of polio, 90 percent of the population need to be immunized in order to wipe out the disease. Polio is already making a comeback in some parts of the world, with more than a dozen African countries reporting polio outbreaks this year.

“We cannot let our fight against one disease come at the expense of long-term progress in our fight against other diseases,” said UNICEF’s Executive Director Henrietta Fore. “We have effective vaccines against measles, polio and cholera,” she said. “While circumstances may require us to temporarily pause some immunization efforts, these immunizations must restart as soon as possible or we risk exchanging one deadly outbreak for another.”

Six Social Health System Teams to Encourage People to Seek Healthcare

Alexandra Wilson Pecci noted that the campaign, which aims to encourage people to get healthcare when they need it, comes as providers across the country have seen a dramatic drop in visits and revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Six of Los Angeles County’s largest nonprofit health systems with hospitals, clinics, and care facilities are teaming for BetterTogether.Health, a campaign that aims to encourage people to get healthcare when they need it, despite the current pandemic.

The campaign, from Cedars-Sinai, Dignity Health, Providence, UCLA Health, Keck Medicine of USC, and Kaiser Permanente, comes as hospitals and healthcare provider offices across the country have seen a dramatic drop in visits and revenue.

“We know many patients who in the past dialed 911 for life-threatening emergencies are now not accessing these vital services quickly,” Julie Sprengel, President, Southwest Division of Dignity Health Hospitals, CommonSpirit Health, said in a statement. “We are instead seeing patients that delayed, postponed or cancelled care coming to emergency departments with serious conditions that should have been treated far earlier.”

Indeed, outpatient hospital visits experienced a record one-week 64% decline during the week of April 5-11, compared to pre-COVID-19 volumes, according to research from TransUnion Healthcare. In addition, hospital visit volumes further declined 33%-62% between the weeks of March 1-7 and April 12-18.

Those stats were echoed in a Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) survey last month showing that physician practices reported a 60% average decrease in patient volume and a 55% average decrease in revenue since the beginning of the public health emergency. 

In addition, nearly two-thirds of hospital executives expect full year revenues will decline by at least 15% due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, according to a Guidehouse analysis of a survey conducted by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA).

The campaign’s website and PSAs communicate messages like “Life may be on pause. Your health isn’t.,” “Thanks L.A. for doing your part.,” and “Get care when you need it.”

In addition to lost revenue, healthcare providers are warning of a “silent sub-epidemic” of those who are avoiding getting medical care when they need it, which could result in serious, negative health consequences that could be avoided.

“There is concern that patients with serious conditions are putting off critical treatments,” Tom Jackiewicz, CEO of Keck Medicine of USC, said in a statement. “We know that seeking immediate care for heart attacks and strokes can be life-saving and may minimize long-term effects. Our hospitals and health care providers are ready and open to serve your needs.”

The BetterTogether.Health public service effort combines those health systems’ resources to create a joint message that will include multi-language television and radio spots, and billboards, messages in newspapers, magazines, digital, and social media; online information, and links to healthcare resources.

It’s reminding people to seek care for things ranging from heart attack symptoms to keeping up with children’s immunization schedules.

“Receiving timely treatment by skilled medical professionals is essential to helping us achieve for our patients and communities the best possible outcomes,” Tom Priselac, President and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System. “Please do not delay getting your health care. We encourage you to call a trusted health care provider like your doctor’s office, hospital or urgent care center.”

Doctors raise alarm about health effects of continued coronavirus shutdown: ‘Mass casualty incident’

Furthermore, Tyler Olson reported something that most of us physicians realized as this pandemic continued that and that more than 600 doctors signed onto a letter sent to President Trump Tuesday pushing him to end the “national shutdown” aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus, calling the widespread state orders keeping businesses closed and kids home from school a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing health consequences.”

The letter what I stated in the beginning of this post, which outlines a variety of consequences that the doctors have observed resulting from the coronavirus shutdowns, including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to “poverty and financial uncertainty,” which “is closely linked to poor health.”

“We are alarmed at what appears to be the lack of consideration for the future health of our patients,” the doctors say in their letter. “The downstream health effects … are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error.”

The letter continues: “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.

“Because the harm is diffuse, there are those who hold that it does not exist. We, the undersigned, know otherwise.”

The letter comes as the battle over when and how to lift coronavirus restrictions continues to rage on cable television, in the courts, in protests and among government officials. Those for lifting the restrictions have warned about the economic consequences of keeping the shutdowns in effect. Those advocating a more cautious approach say that having more people out and about will necessarily end with more people becoming infected, causing what National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci warned in a Senate hearing last week would be preventable “suffering and death.”

But these doctors point to others that are suffering, not from the economy or the virus, but simply from not being able to leave home. The doctors’ letter lists a handful of patients by their initials and details their experiences.

“Patient E.S. is a mother with two children whose office job was reduced to part-time and whose husband was furloughed,” the letter reads. “The father is drinking more, the mother is depressed and not managing her diabetes well, and the children are barely doing any schoolwork.”

“Patient A.F. has chronic but previously stable health conditions,” it continues. “Her elective hip replacement was delayed, which caused her to become nearly sedentary, resulting in a pulmonary embolism in April.”

 Dr. Mark McDonald, a psychiatrist, noted in a conversation with Fox News that a 31-year-old patient of his with a history of depression who was attending school to get a master’s degree in psychology died about two weeks ago of a fentanyl overdose. He blames the government-imposed shutdown.

“She had to stay in her apartment, essentially in-house arrest as most people here in [Los Angeles] were for weeks and weeks, she could not see her therapist — she could speak to the therapist over the phone but she couldn’t see her in person. She could not attend any of her group meetings, which were helping to maintain her abstinence from opiates … and she relapsed into depression.

“She was just too withdrawn to ask for help,” McDonald continued before noting that due to regulations only six people could be at her funeral. “She was simply trying to escape from her pain… I do blame these actions by the government for her death.”

Fox News asked McDonald, as well as three other doctors who were involved with the letter, if they thought the indirect effects of the shutdowns outweighed the likely direct consequences of lifting them — the preventable “suffering and death” Fauci referred to in last week’s Senate hearing. All four said that they believe they do.

“The very initial argument … which sounded reasonable three months ago, is that in order to limit the overwhelmed patient flux into hospitals that would prevent adequate care, we needed to spread out the infections and thus the deaths in specific locales that could become hotspots, particularly New York City… It was a valid argument at the beginning based on the models that were given,” McDonald said. “What we’ve seen now over the last three months is that no city — none, zero — outside of New York has even been significantly stressed.”

McDonald is referring to the misconception that business closures and stay-at-home orders aimed at “flattening the curve” are meant to reduce the total number of people who will fall ill because of the coronavirus. Rather, these curve-flattening measures are meant largely to reduce the number of people who are sick at any given time, thus avoiding a surge in cases that overwhelms the health care system and causes otherwise preventable deaths because not all patients are able to access lifesaving critical care.

McDonald said that “hospitals are not only not overwhelmed, they’re actually being shut down.” He noted that at one hospital in the Los Angeles area where Dr. Simone Gold, the head organizer of the letter, works “the technicians in the ER have been cut by 50 percent.”

Gold also said the effects of the shutdown are more serious for the vast majority of people than the potential virus spread if it is quickly lifted.

“When you look at the data of the deaths and the critically ill, they are patients who were very sick to begin with,” she said, “There’s always exceptions. … But when you look at the pure numbers, it’s overwhelmingly patients who are in nursing homes and patients with serious underlying conditions. Meaning, that that’s where our resources should be spent. I think it’s terribly unethical… part of the reason why we let [the virus] fly through the nursing homes is because we’re diverting resources across society at large. We have limited resources we should put them where it’s killed people.”

People of all ages, of course, have been shown to be able to catch the coronavirus. And there have been reported health complications in children that could potentially be linked to the disease. Fauci also warned about assuming that children are largely protected from the effects of the virus.

“We don’t know everything about this virus … especially when it comes to children,” Fauci said in a Senate hearing last week. “We ought to be careful and not cavalier.”

Newport Beach, Calif., concierge doctor Dr. Jeffrey Barke, who led the letter effort with Gold, also put an emphasis on the disparity in who the virus effects.

“There are thousands of us out there that don’t agree with the perspective of Dr. Fauci and [White House coronavirus response coordinator] Dr. Deborah Birx that believe, yes, this virus is deadly, it’s dangerous, and it’s contagious, but only to a select group of Americans,” he said. “The path forward is to allow the young and healthy, the so-called herd, to be exposed and to develop a degree of antibodies that both now is protective to them and also prevents the virus from spreading to the most vulnerable.”

Dr. Scott Barbour, an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta, reflected the comments the other doctors made about how the medical system has been able to handle the coronavirus without being overwhelmed, but also noted that the reported mortality rates from the coronavirus might be off.

“The vast majority of the people that contract this disease are asymptomatic or so minimally symptomatic that they’re not even aware that they’re sick. And so the denominator in our calculation of mortality rate is far greater than we think,” he said. “The risk of dying from COVID is relatively small when we consider these facts.”

Gold, an emergency medicine specialist based in Los Angeles, led the letter on behalf of a new organization called A Doctor a Day.

A Doctor a Day has not yet formally launched but sent the letter, with hundreds of signatures from physicians nationwide, to the White House on Tuesday. Gold and the group’s co-founder, Barke, said they began the organization to advocate for patients against the government-imposed coronavirus shutdowns by elevating the voices of doctors who felt that the negative externalities of the shutdowns outweigh the potential downside of letting people resume their normal business.

To gather signatures for the letter, Gold and Barke partnered with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a doctors’ group that advocates for less government interference in the relationship between doctors and patients, and notably has taken part in legal challenges against the Affordable Care Act and advocated to allow doctors to use hydroxychloroquine on themselves and their patients.

Gold, in a conversation with Fox News, lamented that the debate around hydroxychloroquine has become politicized, noting that it is taken as a preventative measure for other diseases and that the potentially harmful effects of the drug mainly affect people with heart issues.

The drug is approved to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, but the Food and Drug Administration has said that “hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19.”

The FDA has also warned health professionals that the drug should not be used to treat COVID-19 outside of hospital or research settings.

Gold said she has direct knowledge of physicians who are taking hydroxychloroquine and said that although “we will see” about its efficacy as it is studied more, there have been some indicators that it could be effective at preventing or mitigating COVID-19 and she could therefore understand why doctors might take the drug themselves or prescribe it to their patients.

There is also other research that appears to indicate hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment for the coronavirus, which has largely informed the consensus that the risks of the drug outweigh the potential benefits.

Gold, who is a member of the national leadership council for the Save Our Country Coalition — an assortment of conservative groups that aim “to bring about a quick, safe and responsible reopening of US society” — also said she was concerned that her message about the harms of shutdowns is becoming politicized. She said that she agreed with the general principles of the coalition and decided to sign on when asked, but hasn’t done much work with it and is considering asking to have her name removed because people are largely associating her message on reopening the country with a conservative political point of view.

“I haven’t done anything other than that,” she said. “It’s causing a big misunderstanding about what I’m doing so I actually think I’m just going to take my name off because it’s not really supposed to be political.”

Gold also said she is not associated with the Trump reelection campaign in any way, referring to her inclusion in an Associated Press story about the Trump campaign’s efforts to recruit doctors to support the president’s message on lifting coronavirus restrictions. The AP story details a call organized CNP Action, also part of the Save Our Country Coalition, which involved a senior Trump campaign staffer and was aimed at recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to make television appearances calling for the reopening of the economy as quickly as possible.

Fauci says extended stay-home orders could cause ‘irreparable damage’

Just recently Dr. Fauci changed his view on stay-home orders. Dom Calicchio reported that stay-home orders that extend too long could cause the U.S. “irreparable damage,” Dr. Anthony Fauci finally warned Friday.

Strict crackdowns on large gatherings and other orders, such as for home quarantines, were needed when the coronavirus first hit the nation, but those rules can now begin to be lifted in many parts of the country, Fauci said during an interview on CNBC.

“I don’t want people to think that any of us feel that staying locked down for a prolonged period of time is the way to go,” the member of the White House coronavirus task force said.

“But now is the time, depending upon where you are and what your situation is, to begin to seriously look at reopening the economy, reopening the country to try to get back to some degree of normal.” He warned, however, against reckless reopenings and called for the use of “very significant precautions” as restrictions are lifted.

Fauci told CNBC that staying closed for too long could cause “irreparable damage.” He said the US had to institute severe measures because #Covid19 cases were exploding “But now is the time, depending upon where you are and what your situation is” to open.

“In general, I think most of the country is doing it in a prudent way,” he said. “There are obviously some situations where people might be jumping over that. I just say, ‘Please, proceed with caution if you’re going to do that.’”

Fauci’s comments came one day after two top Republicans – Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona – wrote in an op-ed that Fauci’s initial safety recommendations had “emasculated” the nation’s health care system and “ruined” its economy.

“Fauci and company have relied on models that were later found to be deficient. He even has suggested that he can’t rely, on any of the models, especially if the underlying assumptions are wrong,” the pair wrote in USA Today. “Yet, Fauci persists in advocating policies that have emasculated the medical care system and ruined the economy.”

They also pointed to Fauci’s testimony last week before a Senate committee that opening too soon would “result in needless suffering and death.”

“What about the countless stories of needless suffering and death produced by Fauci’s one-size-fits-all approach to public health?” Paul and Biggs asked.

They called for policies based on trusting the risk assessment of the American people rather than a federal government mandate.

Earlier Friday, Fauci said it was “conceivable” that the U.S. could begin to distribute a coronavirus vaccine by December. “Back in January of this year when we started the phase 1 trial, I said it would likely be between a year and 18 months before we would have a vaccine,” Fauci said during an interview on NPR. “I think that schedule is still intact.

“I think it is conceivable,” he continued, “if we don’t run into things that are, as they say, unanticipated setbacks, that we could have a vaccine that we could be beginning to deploy at the end of this calendar year, December 2020, or into January, 2021.”

My question is what does the future of medicine look like going forward from this pandemic and how do we plan for a better healthcare system and assist in the recovery of our economy?

More on that in future posts.