Fewer people are wearing masks these days, and the COVID-19 vaccination rates have plummeted. Even President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over.
But health care professionals at Providence Business News’ Fall 2022 Health Care Summit warned that the public should not let its guard down, particularly with winter approaching.
“That’s one of the most frequent questions I get asked as an epidemiologist: When will this be over? It’s the wrong question,” Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, inaugural director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health, said during the summit at Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick on Oct. 27. “This virus is here to stay.”
Nuzzo was joined during one of the panel discussions by Dr. Kirsten Anderson, senior medical director for New England at CVS Health Corp./Aetna Inc.; Dr. LouAnne Giangreco, senior medical director at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island; Dr. Peter Hollmann, chief medical officer of Brown Medicine; Dr. Alexis Kearney, consultant medical director at the R.I. Department of Health; and Dr. Claire Levesque, chief medical officer of commercial products at Point 32Health, the parent company of Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
The panelists reflected on the primary lessons the state’s health care sector has learned from the pandemic and on the leftover challenges that continue to linger today.
While the number of cases and deaths are significantly lower than in the past two years, COVID-19 still causes between 300 and 400 deaths per day in the U.S., Nuzzo said. In fact, the nation is on a trajectory to record up to 150,000 deaths from COVID-19 this year, Anderson said.
And most health care professionals agree that the first line of defense remains a vaccine booster.
Nationwide, vaccination rates have dropped drastically, with a booster uptake at around 10%, Anderson said. The numbers look better in Rhode Island, where about 75%-80% of the population has been vaccinated and the booster uptake is about 56%, according to Kearney. But there is still a “huge way to go,” she said.
“We think we’re doing relatively well in Rhode Island, but we need to stay on top of it,” Levesque said.
Vaccine accessibility is one of the main obstacles preventing people from receiving their shots. The panelists said ensuring vaccines are available to everyone and administered at convenient locations is fundamental if the goal is to increase vaccination rates.
Accessibility is particularly important for communities that have been historically underserved in health care. The pandemic has highlighted deeply rooted inequities in the health care system, which the panelists said must be addressed with long-term solutions, not short-term fixes. Making health care accessible and affordable is a big piece of the puzzle, but building trust with communities is just as important, the panelists said.
“It needs to be a system approach,” Giangreco said. “We need to make sure we’re integrating those concepts of health equity into the work we are doing.”
They also discussed the role employers play within the health care system. On one hand, they can play an important role in encouraging workers to get vaccinated by paying workers for their time off and allowing them to stay home in case they experience any side effects.
On the other hand, many employers are struggling with a lack of guidance surrounding “long COVID,” which remains in the early stages of research and is partially a mystery to researchers. But with about 1 in 13 people reporting symptoms of long COVID – cases where symptoms last longer than a few weeks – it is important for employers to learn how to support their employees, Giangreco said.
The prevalence of long COVID-19 is creating obstacles not only for employers but also for insurers who are unsure how to address it.
“We need to treat this illness like we treat any other illness in the workforce,” Hollmann said. “We have to recognize that it’s an illness and that’s indisputable.”
Despite lingering concerns for the coming months, panelists said the state and the country have learned a lot from the crisis. Anderson applauded how much individuals have learned in the last two years, from masking to vaccines – a “collective knowledge” that she said is “remarkable.”
At the same time, Hollmann said he was impressed by the scientific response.
“I would have never thought 10 years ago that we could have responded to an epidemic the way we did,” Hollmann said. “Coming out with the genetic ability to create vaccines, that’s staggering. It’s really amazing what science did there.”
