Why Whitmer is Wrong to Want to Move COVID-19 Patients
And what we should do instead.
A Bridge article about Gretchen Whitmer’s plans to extend the lockdown in Michigan mentioned that the governor is encouraging less-crowded hospitals in other areas of the state to accept transfers of COVID-19 patients from Detroit.
This is a bad idea because hospitals are a major source of the spread of infection.
According to Medline Plus, a government-run site, lives are lost every year due to the spread of infection in hospitals. Although efforts are being made to keep COVID-19 patients isolated, hospitals cannot guarantee that the infection won’t be spread from patient to healthcare worker to other patients.
And since the virus can be spread before a person is aware they are sick, it is likely that healthcare workers who get infected will be in contact with other patients before they realize they have the disease. Personal protection equipment reduces the spread of disease, but it cannot eliminate it completely.
By transferring COVID-19 patients to areas where the disease is not as big a problem, we risk spreading it to those communities more quickly than it would otherwise spread. That is not acceptable.
Instead of transferring COVID-19 patients to other hospitals, we should try to divert non-COVID-19 cases to other hospitals before the patients arrive, so that they are not exposed to the disease in the Detroit hospitals before being transferred.
This would lessen the load on Detroit hospitals without unnecessarily increasing the spread of COVID-19 to other communities.
