COVID-related fears of emergency room are unwarranted, L+M doctor says
New London — A lot of emergency room physicians have been asking themselves a rather curious question lately: Where are the patients?
Dr. Craig Mittleman, regional director of emergency medical services at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, has been wondering, and so have his colleagues at Westerly Hospital, the Pequot Health Center in Groton and throughout the Yale New Haven Health system.
“People should not be avoiding us,” Mittleman said in an interview Thursday. “We’re fully staffed and ready to treat patients. We’re as available and as efficient as we’ve ever been.”
Mittleman and others believe people are wary of emergency rooms because they fear catching COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. People may believe that both patients who have the disease and the health care workers who treat them pose risks.
“Obviously, some of this is an abundance of fear that the emergency room is a dangerous place to be,” Mittleman said. “Early on, there was a lot of messaging about not coming to the ER if you had mild COVID symptoms. People got that message.”
The problem is that people who need emergency room services — victims of heart attacks, strokes, acute appendicitis and the like — are putting themselves at risk by staying away, he said.
Before the pandemic, L+M, Pequot and Westerly Hospital typically saw nearly 300 emergency room patients a day, and L+M and Westerly admitted about 20% of those they saw, according to Mittleman.
“We have seen a profound decrease in total volume, but an increase in the percentage of admissions, suggesting that those coming in are sicker than usual,” he said. “This is speculative on my part, but my thought is that people are more hesitant and may be waiting longer for their symptoms to worsen before their threshold is reached."
“It’s not just us," he added. "What's happening nationally is that all the cases you regularly see in emergency rooms are down across the board. People are either staying home or staying home longer than they otherwise would so that when they get to the ER, they’re in far more critical condition.”
Mittleman said people should know that emergency rooms are safe — safer, he said, than the local grocery store.
Having seen their share of COVID-19, L+M emergency room staff are well trained and equipped to protect themselves and patients, Mittleman said. Those who have tested positive for the disease or are suspected of having it are cared for in a designated area of the emergency room.
ER staff have access to an array of personal protective equipment, or PPE, including N95 respirators; PAPRs, or powered, air-purifying respirators that consist of a hood and a face shield; surgical masks; face shields; gowns; gloves; head covers and shoe covers.
“We’ve got hand sanitizer posted on every wall, nook and cranny of the emergency room,” Mittleman said.
He said that while there's been a “smattering” of cases of COVID-19 involving Yale New Haven Health staff, he’s not aware of any member of the L+M emergency room staff who has had to quarantine because of a positive test.
“I’m guessing people are watching the news and they’re seeing what’s happening in New York City and west of us and they’re getting the idea that emergency rooms are places you want to stay away from,” Mittleman said, referring to chaotic scenes in some big-city hospitals. “But it’s not like that here.”
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