[Music] they're the ones who raise the bar the ones dedicated to providing care in the most demanding of circumstances the ones that understand the healing benefits of kindness and compassion they're the people of sarah bush lincoln and they set the bar high sarah bush lincoln trusted compassionate care right here close to home for over 50 years horizon health has been keeping you and your family healthy and although some things have changed horizon health's commitment to meet the ever-changing needs of our community has remained the same horizon health 50 years strong carl is redefining health care around you innovating new solutions and offering all levels of care when and where you need it investing in technology and research to optimize health care carl with health alliance is always at the forefront to help you thrive [Music] good evening and thank you for joining us for this edition live being well the pandemic panel i'm your host lacey spence and i am so happy to be sharing the weiu studios live this evening with four fabulous doctors i will go ahead and let them introduce their selves we will start on the end with you good evening dr bill elliott i'm a clinical psychologist at horizon health in paris with operations in kansas oakland and chrisman and marshall hi my name is bob healy i'm an internal medicine physician and i'm at carl health and i'm up at the urbana crowdfundation hospitals where my offices are and yeah very nice to be here hey good evening i'm dr ryan jennings and i'm privileged to serve as the chief medical officer at hshs facilities at saint anthony's in effingham good shepherd in shelbyville and holy family in greenville my name is jeremy topen i am a pulmonary and critical care physician at sarah bush lincoln hospital and medical director of the icu wonderful so we've got a lot of backgrounds represented here this evening and we are hoping that our viewers will call in and pick their brains so how this evening will work we have the phone number at the bottom of the screen at this moment we've got 1-877-727-9348 and that number is also on our weiu social media and so for the rest of this hour the floor is pretty much yours i've prepared a little background questions just waiting on your phone call so we hope that you will call in we've got people standing by to answer the phones take down those questions they'll pass them on to me and then we will pose them to the panel so to jump right in and get started i think we should start with all of your perspectives as the pandemic was unfolding just what did things look like how did situations unfold what do you remember we'll start with dr elliott well i think what stands out to me is the impact on children and adolescents the incredible disruption in routines school of course being the main one the the adjustment by by students and teachers to um switching rapidly to online instruction and i just think that here we are two years later and um kudos to kids for having made the adaptation but also particularly the teachers who really were underappreciated perhaps then i hope they're more appreciated now but that stands out to me from the outset the resilience for sure absolutely dr healy yeah it's a great question a lot of things going through my brain but i think at first fear you know everyone was afraid um physicians um our nursing staff our other teammates in healthcare afraid for our community i come home and answer questions from my family who are afraid that and then the the ever-changing information that would come out so we would say one thing one day and then you know we'd learn something else and then have to say something different the next week or the next day those are the things that come to mind dr jennings i would have to echo that the very first thing was fear you know in my family three the four of us work in health care and you know we came home after things were really starting to heat up and had a meeting their adult and said do you gonna continue to work in health care type conversation this at that point they're talking about a 15 mortality rate and and and i'm sitting there as the person who's saying that well if you do get sick you won't have a visitor and very difficult conversation thankfully everyone said no i want to be part of this and and continue to step up and within the organization as they came back and then tried to kind of work with physicians and our teams to keep the the momentum going around it it was amazing how quickly it shifted from fear to innovation and you know just thinking about a problem differently and so it was it was quick pace to say the least but definitely the very first thoughts were just fear yeah i you know very similar as well um my experience was very icu centric uh and dealt obviously with uh the patients that were on the extreme end of the severity of disease and and it's hard to forget what our unit went through and what the community went through in the icu we things were changing in terms of best practices and how to how to best care for these patients but knowing that the majority of patients once are on a ventilator we're not going to have a good outcome we're going to most likely die and not having family available to be advocates and care and support and the added burdens of communication with family that's distant and not seeing what we're doing and and that challenge of building trust um was a a new dynamic in that in an icu setting uh and just the volume and acuity that all of our icus you know around the country had to quickly uh step up to uh and and sort of innovate our way to kind of figuring out a lot of problems on the fly um that's gonna really stick around to to i think all of us for for a long time and you all have brought up a very good point you've kind of uh launched into something i want to talk about i would like to say that at this point for what we have experienced we have passed a peak at least during the peak of your respective fields what were conditions like we can we can start with you i know you were saying you know ventilators and and the stress on your health care system you know the the peak for us at sarah bush i mean it you know we have a nine bed icu uh on a busy day of the icu filled maybe two or three patients on ventilators we had at one point sixteen patients on ventilators all at the same time some on the floors struggling to find rooms staffing was a challenge to make sure that all the patients adequately had the care that they need it's very intense bedside care so the ability of the hospital to kind of step up try to figure out ways to do the best we can with the resources we had was kind of impressive but something that just added a burden of stress on everyone it's interesting now that times are much slower in the ease and i look around at the staffing and it's a shame to see how much staff has moved on i mean how many nurses have have left the unit how many nurses have moved on to other environments because i think the burnout and the intensity of that um i think people are still we're really all feeling the impact of that i'm going to feel that impact for a long time at its peak uh you know i think the the patient volume was part of the the struggle of course as you would expect and you know when you're looking at hundreds of people across our health system that were in the hospital concurrently but at the same time especially pre-vaccine the workforce was still getting coveted at a certain pace and so we would be having large numbers of employees out at the same time now post-vaccine that world looks a little different but but early on in kind of the thick of it you not only had increased demand just from volume but you had decreased ability to take care of it because your staff was sick and and of course your care for those folks and and want them back we were fortunate because of being kind of part of a health system but even nationally the national stockpile resources and and being able to move resources within our own health system and things like that so that we didn't run into a lot of major shortages it got pretty spooky at times we had some uh fabrication done to create masks and things locally you know with local contractors so that we could maintain that supply so again lots of innovation but uh but thankfully uh you know i think everybody prevailed and i would echo the concerns of the loss in our health care workforce many people opted for a new career dr healy yeah um a couple themes i think the innovation just you know our community making masks at first when we didn't have enough masks and they could use it we could use it visitors could use it when we still had visitors i think you know one of the things is the i mentioned fear earlier also you mentioned how our our staff our colleagues were getting sick and that and that that's really you know that really affected us right because they're people that we work with every day um i think we all were able to keep our our people safe though with the proper ppe or personal protective equipment but it did get scary at times with not having what i thought would be enough but our staff always came up with the right amount and always came up with the mask when they needed that um but it was some scary times yeah and then from your perspective i mean did you see a volume of patience dealing with i mean mental health was huge what i saw was sadly was an intensification of pre-existing mental health issues where there was domestic violence it it rose dramatically where there were substance use issues already present they got worse where there had been histories of trauma the experience itself was traumatic and then re-traumatizing for many people and i think the most disturbing thing was seeing that older children and adolescents for whom suicide rate suicidal thinking and what we call non-suicidal self-injury which is self-mutilation and other self-injury to as an anxiety uh coping mechanism all of those soared and you know that was a tough time across the board and mental health was was no exception so as uh you guys had kind of talked about watching the information the flow of it how quickly it came in how quickly it was to change really experiencing kind of the scientific method in real time how was it trying to communicate that information to patients at least from a media standpoint i feel like there might have been a little bit of a divide where folks were well we believe the data and we can't trust the data because it's changed again how did you kind of instill some confidence in best practices well you know speaking to again in the icu when patients where they're sickest and some of that distrust could could foment a lot is patients are getting worse and not responding as many don't as to our therapies it was a challenge a challenge to you know try to explain you know why medications aren't appropriate medicines like ivermectin and other remedies versus medicines that we had that there was some evidence i mean that i think there's been two levels of of that challenge one is just the the information that's out there that we know was good the efficacy of vaccines efficacy is or certain medications and battling that and then there in the unit itself you're talking about the scientific method how do we best treat these patients you know the truth is we the scientific method takes time yeah and the good data and the good evidence while we were in the middle of it wasn't out yet and in some ways if we're waiting for the hard science to come out we're going to be way behind the curve and i think it was a challenge for all of us to figure out what is best practice and a lot of communication with other peers and colleagues and trying to be on the forefront of things and yet we're still behind the science and yet still have the trust of the families and the patients and be open and honest about that that dynamic does not happen that often in medicine and it really stressed it was another big stress point for the system the rest of you yeah i don't know about you but my icu colleagues were social media worked well because they were online they were talking to people in italy when it was happening at a real fast pace people in new york when it was happening knowing it was coming here people in chicago and then you know it eventually hit us but i think there were a lot of good things that were spread by social media back then definitely definitely uh a tool to be used but also to be cautious with you know a lot of people should be jumped on the bandwagon early months later wasn't and and that's a problem when you're trying to build trust one wait something you said two months ago is not applicable now and that is part of the scientific method of iterating and improving and i think that's hard for a public to understand especially when they're getting a lot of mixed messages on social media as well yeah that was definitely a two-edged sword social media well speaking of a double-edged sword one of the striking things was was having kids come in who those who were using social media for maintaining connections with peers and friends actually fared better psychologically but if the kid was using it as his or her primary source of information about it it was a disaster and unless they had a strong relationship with a parent or or sibling who could say now listen listen to the science don't listen to this stuff that was an uphill battle that i don't know that we really ever surmounted well i think the thing that that is it's not over you know and and we're still on the front end of understanding long covid and the long-term consequences physically emotionally etc of this disease and same problem exactly the same problem there's a little bit of information here and a little bit of that and a little bit of that and the the process hasn't had time to bear itself out to tell us what the truth is and so we're going to be in the same process of trying to explain things to the public as we deal with this without really knowing the truth because we just haven't had the time and very frustrating and pardon me if it's a if it's a silly way to ask it but i feel like when we have a seasonal flu you're able to kind of pinpoint that maybe these are what the symptoms are but it felt as if the variants were coming out so quickly and then you've got jim over here who's asymptomatic you've got somebody who feels like it's allergies and then other people they're landing in the icu did you have a difficult time trying to explain that to patients and work that out yeah i think it was definitely a tough uh thing to talk about because um right people get gi upset and they call and say what do you think this could be the answer was always well it's coveted until we prove otherwise they'll get tested when the testing was available but yeah there was such many varied symptoms and the the new variants would cause a little bit of a difference a sore throat as opposed to the the um what might have happened the ramp before so um yeah i think part of the uh part of the confusion um of that happening was you know the trust uh you told me before it was x y and z and now you're telling me it's this you know why is that and of course it's just because the nature of the evolution of the virus and even the same household i mean you've got husband and wife and one sneezes twice and the other one's on a vent yeah and how do you explain that and you know other than just uh human character and you know and and maybe they had some comorbidities maybe that's some other reason why they got sicker but there was no doubt that this particular virus put itself out in enormous spread of symptoms and i think one of the challenges early on was that most people didn't know someone who got sick and so to hear it was always someone else or it's not going to happen to me and i think that was a very big challenge early on in trying to convince people to get vaccinated and they're sort of balancing their perceived risk of vaccine which are very safe versus the risk of getting severe covid i think though that after now two plus years i think in coles county i mean it is a little bit of an easier sell because i think almost everyone knows someone who has been severely impacted by covet i think roughly you know a population in coles county of 48 000 or so i think one in 280 have died from covid and so it doesn't take much for a church community or a school community to know someone now who's who's passed away but even despite that i think our vaccination rate in coles county is only 47 percent right now so a push for those i mean we can still do better getting vaccinated and there's a new vaccine that's going to be coming down the pike hopefully in the next few weeks and uh an updated one just like the flu uh sort of one more tailored so we're going to be having those discussions with patients again in a push for for another vaccine well just to give you the floor on vaccination um i again in news i hear all of it i hear both sides and i have to admit that there's been a little skepticism just between the folks who have maybe gotten the vaccine and they still got coveted or they didn't get it as badly or things of that nature or why they need to continue to get the boosters can you kind of walk us through that explanation why that's so important so he doesn't have to work so hard [Laughter] exactly and that's the key and i think the message initially was wow these vaccines are so effective they're like 94 effective at preventing getting the disease yeah and that was true very early on with the first set of you know first variant that we had now it is extremely effective it's just extremely effective at preventing severe disease it's extremely effective at preventing someone from coming to my icu it's not so effective at getting the disease but but ultimately from a medical standpoint i mean that's not the big outcome i mean the big outcome is death you know and it is highly highly effective at that and so i think but again it's it's a message early on was that these are preventing getting it yeah i won't get it i'm safe and so it really threw people off and now the message is well you may still get it but you are the risk of death it drops dramatically yeah i think we all have data of our own hospitals and systems but now we have a lot of people we have a lot of people in the community getting infected and you know various symptoms out there in the community we have still a pretty good number of people in the hospital but they're not in the icu they're not being you know in five days going from a positive test to they can't breathe they're on a machine and then they wind up dying that's what was before vaccines now it's better because of vaccines sure so for people who are concerned or have heard rumors seen headlines about vaccine injury what kind of data are you getting on that to kind of help put them at ease it's a tell it's a story that's still not fully told of course because again we moved quickly and i know many people question the mrna based vaccines uh fortunately we just have approval for yet another vaccine the nova vax vaccine was just approved and that's a different type of technology so there's there's choices they all seem to be exceptionally safe and they all are highly effective at keeping you out of the icu and keeping you from dying so you know for folks that said well i don't want pfizer because it's mrna well now you've got some choices and uh the only one that still has some some significant uh uh warnings and are only to be used in limited circumstances the j j vaccine at this point but the others are have an incredible safety profile i think leading into the scientific method we don't have years of data we have a couple years now but not decades of data on these vaccines but the amount of the millions and millions of people who have gotten a vaccine if things were to happen like if in five years something were to develop from that vaccine we would know that now because of all the millions of people getting the dose that is it's not an experiment to get the vaccine but it's really an experiment in seeing are are things popping up are people suddenly dying are people having heart attacks are people having other problems and we're not seeing that what we're seeing is that we in in the u.s we've saved hundreds of thousands of lives by using the vaccine and like i said people aren't coming to the icu they're not dying like they did before so we've got a couple of viewer questions coming in first if i've had one booster when should i get the next one or should i have already had one what is our vaccine schedule at now so yeah there i think the the definitive recommendations for this newest booster that we anticipate to be coming out is not yet there but i think the thought is that it should be two months you should get the newest booster that will be available two months after your last booster and so if you just recently have gotten a booster dose you should wait two months before you get the new updated omicron focused uh vaccine um so that's sort of i think what's coming out but that has not been officially most of the pharmacies have paused and physician officers paused giving the other vaccine in you know the older vaccine in anticipation and there are a few of the health departments that already have access to the bivalent vaccine so it's out there in limited quantity at this point uh but yeah two month interval and and um and especially high-risk groups i mean once again it's always a risk-benefit conversation but high-risk groups which unfortunately i'm 50 so i'm in we know we're like others we're going to make it easy for people because we'll have the bivalent vaccine at the same time you get your flu shot so one in each arm you're set to go so bivalent is that so whatever so uh thanks for pointing that out i'll define it so the new vaccine the previous vaccine was for one strain the original strain the original s protein spike protein that was on the original virus now they have one for both the original virus and also for the omicron are ba5 so it's two different variants of the of the virus in one vaccine so it's called bivalent very similar to the flu shot yes but most the time the flu shot has more than one strain in it i think this year's might even be quadrivalent yeah i think it's four yeah there's four strains they'll cover you real good yeah we sure hope hopefully and a follow-up question before uh we take a quick break um so as we are talking about getting the boosters and things of that nature you just said that you could get it at the same time as your flu shot is there any need to wait if you are having any sort of other medical treatment to space them out uh no you know some of our surgery colleagues might say um maybe wait until after your surgery so in case you have a side effect ahead of time if you're sick we might not do surgery so don't mess with the possible side effect but medically speaking scientifically speaking there's nothing that you should that would prevent you from getting that vaccine and when you're talking side effect you mean if i'm feeling um sluggish the fever that's brief those type of things exactly yeah gotcha because you're revving up your immune system and it's going to work it's going to protect you wonderful well you all are doing a fabulous job thank you for answering our questions we are going to pivot and take a quick break and we will be back in just a moment but again if you have any questions please call in the number is 877-727-9348 we'll be right back this is the pbs video app install it on your phone tablet smart tv or other streaming device and use it to access more of the pbs shows you love but if you're looking for even more shows to binge like this or early access to shows like this then look for this icon that's the passport icon and it means that video is part of passport passport is our way of saying thank you to our station members donate to your local pbs station today and one of the member benefits you'll receive is passport which offers extended access to a growing library of favorite pbs programs [Music] you can support your station and your community by becoming a member today visit pbs.org get passport for details watch passport anytime on any screen wherever you stream it's your ticket to the best of pbs your entertainment options are endless they're on demand and everywhere but we're weiu local with purpose producing programs with fresh perspective building connections through shared experiences sparking curiosity by engaging education just as you enjoy weiu today and we hope every day you make it possible for tomorrow invest in weiu [Music] be with us for a new season of the paw report we travel to the douglas heart nature center to talk bugs and local veterinarians join us in studio with information on pet anxiety and dermatology but that's not all our viewers have some favorites so we're bringing back a few paw report classics too the paw report mondays at 7 on weiu [Music] your favorite fall shows are coming back to weiu including season 15 of being well tune in every tuesday night at 7 to hear from your local medical professionals as they talk about the health topics that matter to you it's season 15 of being well right here on weiu [Music] city spotlight covering communities in central and southeastern illinois since 2015 from danville to taylorville decatur to newton and places in between city spotlight talks with community leaders about what's taking place in their local communities wednesday at seven o'clock on weiu welcome back you've got us for another half hour here for being well the pandemic panel live we would love for you to call in with your questions for our panel of doctors here the number is 877-727-9348 we will throw it at the bottom of the screen for you we've got phone operators standing by waiting to take your questions as we come back from break we've got a little bit of a question from jeff we've got what are some reasons someone would still be wearing a mask now that it's not mandated uh i'll take this one don't fight over it yeah i think that um i think the way to address that now is everyone has to think about themselves at their own personal risk so if someone feels that they're going to have a worse outcome if they get the illness they might take care of a sick loved one at home they might have young children at home they might themselves have co-morbidities that aren't visible but if they feel like wearing a mask that's that's fine let them wear a mask and let them be protected um others might not because their personal risk they view themselves as not at risk or they only get a mild illness because they're vaccinated i think we need to have room for all of those varieties i think the one to add would be somebody that we have an awful lot of medications these days that modulate the immune system so everything from psoriasis to irritable bowels we're not irritable inflammatory bowel disease to you know and so we use a lot of medications that modify the immune system and those are folks that yeah they should at least consider their own risk and i think to add to that just a little bit they've sort of become a little bit smart about sort of the environment um we talk about prevalence when when the virus is more prevalent in the community much higher spread it's much more active than when you're in settings where you're closer and more confined or indoors you may not normally consider a mass but that may be an increased risk of transmission and so i think at times when the virus is hopefully very low uh it's a lot safer to consider being without it so i think we all have to kind of become kind of better consumers and advocate of the information out there to have all the information to make the best risk assessment for ourselves and those that we can potentially expose and and you know for some it's a continuation of a practice that actually was one of the major protective factors against depression and anxiety those who very stayed very tightly to the regimen that was recommended actually showed much less signs of deteriorating mental health so in some ways it actually in is an enhancement of mental health so it may be that the individual in question is continuing something that's worked very well definitely and i think you bring up a great point that in a time where there was a lot that we could not control you could control your own mask wearing your own ppe your social distancing and just kind of trying to make the the best of a situation that was so turbulent the other thing is if you come visit us in our offices or the hospitals or clinics you'll see us all masked because we're still required to there even though we miss your smiling faces it is for a good cause for folks who uh had collected ppe during the height of the pandemic is it good to hang on to those are they okay to pitch them now what is your recommendation most of the stuff get dr crystal but most the standard like just barrier type masks are going to not necessarily lose efficacy we learned a lot though about the uh high level respirators so the n95s and things that everybody talked about and really found out that they last a lot longer than what we thought and they're still very effective so you know i wouldn't get any hurry to just fill the landfill by any means i think the jury's still out but but we definitely had a very large social experience uh or hospital-based experience in extended wear and extended use of masks and found them to continue to be very effective i think if you're if you have cloth masks i think you could view that as something that will protect others from you so if you have symptoms of a cold the flu or covid and you wear a cloth mask that'll help protect you from sneezing coughing into the environment um a surgical mask i think is is effective and it can be helpful even to protect yourself and then the higher level n95s will certainly protect you and i wouldn't get rid of anything right now um and and i'm not saying there's anything coming down the road that i that i know of um but that feeling i had back then when we didn't have the masks i wish we did i'm not gonna i'm not gonna toss any right another question that we had come in it talks about long covid which i know you said we're still learning a lot about can you try to explain a little bit of what the difference is between long covid and just having effects left over is there a difference is it all the same thing i think scientifically you know um it's really important to define what that means and and for most it's that you have some lingering symptoms after four weeks most people when you get sick you'll be sick for seven to ten days whatever your normal course is and maybe you're not back to normal yet a few days after that but by four weeks she'll be you'll be over things what we've seen with long covert is a lot of symptoms lasting longer than four weeks into months and now years in some people so that's how i would differentiate whether i'm i'm sick and just getting getting over it or i might have something such as long cover where i should talk to somebody about it and and from the mental health perspective what we what we've learned from prior disasters pandemics catastrophic events of all kinds is that the mental health impact lasts longer than any other impact so that's to say we don't know what we're going to be facing with the long-term impact on psychological issues we know that it's not going to make anything better and you know i am concerned about increasing rates of ptsd in you know continuing increases in suicide lidiation um and that's why social connection becomes now of paramount importance and hopefully if there's one thing good that's come out of this it's more people really seem to understand the importance of family intimacy um friendships and actually some altruism and empathy on on people outside their uh their normal network so hopefully that those will be protective factors but we have no clue what's down the road in terms of long-term mental health impact does anyone have anything to add before we move on we've got a guest or a viewer question from betty and effingham what oral medications are available for high-risk patients who get breakthrough covets such as prescriptions vitamins etc i can't pronounce them i think the in general are there's two oral medications available for for covid for those that are who are at high risk at risk of being hospitalized uh being in the icu or death uh paxlovit is the one that's most commonly used and if you're at high risk which some of the studies show probably 65 and over for sure should consider themselves high risk and other people with other comorbidities paxlovid taken within five days of your symptom onset can really help you to avoid getting really really sick and available for free so at this point those medications if you see your provider and they prescribe them they're at no cost and so definitely something worth looking at again with the goal of not having to go to the hospital so getting tested early if you have symptoms and then contacting your health care provider if you do if you are positive to see if you're a candidate it's a great idea and anything to add to that i think the pharmacist can prescribe it themselves without necessarily seeing the physician so if that's a barrier to not having a physician or what not the pharmacist can help you work through this and can prescribe it without a physician signature all right we've got susan from ashmore her parents received the first and second coveted vaccine as well as the first booster however they missed the opportunity to get the second booster in time should they get the new vaccine for the omicron or the second booster they both used moderna wait they should get the bivalence vaccine so everyone who's not been vaccinated yet should get two of the mrna vaccines from the original uh bucket the original vaccine and then everyone now who's got their initial two if it's been at least two months should get that bivalent vaccine for a booster and if it's the second boost you still would want if you're in a high risk group and you need a second boost you would want to wait and then indeed most places have stopped even administering the other boost gotcha another question coming in o negative blood type not getting symptoms have you all heard anything about that any truth to that i think there was some you know there was some thought early on that oh negative maybe was a protective factor from severe disease i don't think that's been borne out but that was something that earlier in the pandemic was discussed i remember my daughter reaching out to me asking because she's so negative does she have to worry as much and i said you still need to socially distant and you still need rats and it was not that much fun yeah another question we've got how would panelists explain increased level of sudden death syndrome correlating to increased levels of vaccination in the public i think but you know i i think that's a tough one i mean there's a lot of associations especially when you start working with large numbers teasing out actually cause and effect and confounders it it becomes a little bit difficult i think you know you have a lot of people getting coveted a lot of people getting vaccines there's a lot of incidents of different diseases popping up you know people develop heart attacks i mean there's just a normal rate that goes on in the public with that if you take a look at all the people who now develop coronary disease are found to have corn disease but have all been vaccinated you can potentially look for this association i i think we have to wait and and again have some more time to really get good uh numbers but we we're even better now where we are than we were at the beginning i i just want to raise a lot of people were saying we don't know about these vaccines they haven't been well tested the initial studies had like 60 000 people in them as you mentioned before we're at millions i mean tens hundreds of millions of people have received these vaccines and again they are extremely extremely safe but when you give hundreds of millions of vaccines you have hundreds of millions of people who are living life and getting illnesses and suffering different disease states and so the idea that people of having sudden death i mean there is a certain amount of that that happens in the community at large so i think all of us want to be very wary because we don't want to be absolute but i think i'm wary of the concern of those numbers right now i we just really haven't felt that i think in the medical community that there's this increased risk of death with these vaccines i think that you put it very well um i think it's it's not something for us to ignore if there's we're looking at all this data and there's a lot of noise in the data um like you like you were referring to there are people that will die today and some of them got vaccinated in the last week but whether that's cause and effect you you need to study pretty hard you can't just say because that happened there's there's a cause and effect so i think we have to be aware of it and if there's something that does come through for the data act on it but in my mind someone worrying about sudden death in the vaccine now is is i don't want to minimize that it's obviously an important thing we need to keep track of but for the last 30 years of my practice i've had discussion in the fall with my patients they come in and say i don't want the flu shot because last year i got sick after i got the flu shot i know that the flu shot can't give you a viral infection but i also know that very many people get viral infections in the fall so they would get their flu vaccine and then within a few days they would get their their illness which they would have gotten anyway but in their mind it's connected now and it's hard as humans it's hard for us to separate that that that seems that cause and effect where it might not be and we've all talked earlier that it's going to take years before we really sort out what what do the consequences of all this look like and the mental health aspect of it enormously so i mean you know you get a period of resilience and and people rally and they can get through anything but then that takes a tremendous toll and then there's an afterwards effect that we don't have a grasp on yet so i think it's a great question that that just time's going to tell us yes and thank you to andrew from charleston for that question and as we're talking about mental health let's dive into that just a little bit there's been several groups of people who feel as though they have missed major milestones whether that be a high school graduation or a prom pushing back weddings what types of things are you seeing are people talking about i or maybe they're more serious than pushing events back there are kids and parents for whom missing proms graduation ceremonies in paris for example there's the first friday every may is a major celebration for senior girls called mayfate missing those events for the people in 2019 and 2020 was a major loss and actually felt as being robbed cheated if you will so not only was there the sadness but there was some anger and resentment and that's why it's and i know a number of school systems have really done a good job of trying to come up with some way of compensating for that and kudos to them but it's a real issue and for those who lost that it's not something that you can get back so it's a profound loss and for those of you since you are all in the health system i mean what has the the mental weight been to not be able to escape this information to escape covet chatter i know that here at weiu i helped with the news program for the first couple months when our students didn't come back from spring break and to come in you talk about covid you go home you talk about kova that's that's a huge weight and then you are all seeing it firsthand i think it again to the comment earlier initially there's just this incredible rallying of the human spirit and health care workers were phenomenal i mean acro not just doctors and nurses the the folks that come in and help us make our food and prepare the the the cleanliness of the facility to keep it safe i mean how critically important was housekeeping during this whole thing to keep things safe and folks rallied and came in and just went to the cause and now as it's winding in some ways down the exhaustion is enormous and when we saw lots of people leave the profession whether whether that was truly you know clinical profession or even just get out of health care and and they got away from the the organizations as a whole because they're worn out by it and uh and we're still paying the consequences now hopefully there's a generation of due folks coming in that are excited about it again you know yeah but you know i think as you stated very early on there was there was a rallying there was sort of seeing everyone come together um that was very uplifting and inspiring but i think you know as we've talked about here initially with concerns of masks and then the divisiveness with vaccines uh the medical community is just as people living in in our communities you know have opinions about that too and that kind of crept into the hospital space and everyone kind of working together there became this tension of us working and and not all being on on the same page and that just made things much more difficult as sort of the fourth wave and the most intense wave came through and i think we are going to be feeling the repercussions of that as we talked about with a lot of people leaving exiting healthcare and the pipeline to replace i mean there's a lot of talent and knowledge and wisdom that just left and is leaving and it's not easy to fill quickly and and we're going to be struggling with this in all aspects of medicine for quite a while i think that's one of the things that will take us years to know you know what's really happening right now we know people are leaving we know that you know the great resignation occurred among all of us not just healthcare but i think you know five ten twenty years from now we'll realize how profound this this last couple of years has been and i think we'll also realize we're still in the midst of it even though we like to think it's behind us we're still in it right now and it's just gonna be very interesting to see what what changes in society there are what changes in healthcare there are from this profound event so um the narrative was pretty big for getting a vaccine developed did that overshadow the efficacy of natural immunity like was there did they look at natural immunity did that kind of get pushed to the wayside just for some folks who'd maybe it did feel like a cold or again the risk of natural immunity is that you still are at risk for death and severe disease in the hospitalization yeah and and the vaccine again uh a different type of immunity and actually what we understand about it is that actually the immunity you get from the vaccine is a little bit more breath to it than getting covet itself you tend to have a very strong immunity to the strain you got infected with but the vaccine tends to be a little broader and has really been more sustainable through a lot of the sub-variants that maybe if you had an early infection to one of the earlier variants you have really almost no protection with the natural immunity but again can't stress enough the vaccines prevent death i mean that really is a key take-home message i mean it prevents death and and that's not something that natural immunity can do i think when when the omicron surge happened last year there was data that came out that said you were more likely if you got infected to get long coveted and to wind up in the hospital icu and die if you didn't get any vaccine if you had a previous variant a previous infection that was a little better than no vaccine at all and then best was having the vaccine so the science bore out that natural immunity is important and it's something thankfully we all have were living because of that but it wasn't wasn't enough for this virus and since you bring up long covert again for someone who's experiencing long covid including fatigue and hair loss do you have any uh recommendations i think contacting your health provider your primary care provider and getting in talking about that um there are clinics set up looking specifically at long covid i think the important thing now is for us to gather the data so you going to your your provider and saying i have you know hair loss and fatigue there might not be a lot we could do for you now other than just general health but at least we'll know that that might be that that's in the category of long covid and in the future we might be able to impact that something that can be researched and tested on later exactly keep learning exactly i would caution hair loss [Laughter] doc can testify to this as well after any significant illness uh and pregnancy is a classic example that's not an illness uh you know the the body goes through a period of time where it will pause hair growth and so then you ex you have your normal hair loss and so you lose a ton of hair that's called telogen effluvium that's usually self-limited so i i wouldn't put myself in the bucket of long covered right out of the gate if if my only symptom were hair loss i'd weighed especially if you were sick if you were really sick with it that's a pretty normal phenomenon so as we are looking toward the fall crystal ball edition you knew the question was coming is there any data or inklings coming out about what the forecast might be for covet i feel like we do that every year with the flu and uh is it cold flu and coveted season now we don't know i i think i think uh um if we can look at the last two falls and just in general with viruses uh when it gets colder we kind of cluster a little bit more there tends to be an increased frequency uh the aberration was when we were all wearing masks that actually saw a tremendous decrease in in a lot of these other viral transmissions but i think we can expect to see some sort of uptick hoping that the combination of vaccines natural immunity can kind of help mitigate transmission and spread but i think we're all holding our breath and crossing our fingers maybe a follow-up how will the flu season be this year we do have evidence there because it's winter in the southern hemisphere and it's their flu season and australia has been put hit pretty hard by flu influenza this year so there's indications it could be a bad year this year so one more reason to get your influenza vaccine in our last couple of minutes here uh refer back to another viewer question her neighbor's blood type is o negative the neighbor was diagnosed with covid but didn't know until they had their blood tested their question is what do the studies look like for people with different blood types in their reactions to covid so is any of that data out there i think small amounts of data that were interesting and piqued our interest early on but i don't think those as we looked at larger groups i don't think it bore out as well as those early studies did but it's something that we might know a year or two from now that there was a variation in your if you had a different type of blood type but as you said uh you were oh negative god hit hard not not protected purely by blood type so well we definitely appreciate all of your time this evening you've made for a fabulous show we had a lot of great questions come in from our viewers so we're very thankful for that if you'd like to watch this episode back you can find it on the weiu tv facebook and also youtube page and as we are closing out this evening we hope that you will join us for our new season of being well it starts next tuesday night at 7 pm and for weiu tv i'm lacey spence and have a great night carl is redefining healthcare around you innovating new solutions and offering all levels of care when and where you need it investing in technology and research to optimize healthcare carl with health alliance is always at the forefront to help you thrive for over 50 years horizon health has been keeping you and your family healthy and although some things have changed horizon health's commitment to meet the ever-changing needs of our community has remained the same horizon health 50 years strong they're the ones who raised the bar the ones dedicated to providing care in the most demanding of circumstances the ones that understand the healing benefits of kindness and compassion they're the people of sarah bush lincoln and they set the bar high sarah bush lincoln trusted compassionate care right here close to home [Music] you