(upbeat music) - [Patrick] The COVID virus continues its mutation, the highly contagious Omicron variant first detected in South Africa in early November is now here.

Which is why the West and Southwest Michigan hospitals are ready at a tipping point with Delta variant hospitalizations expect in the coming weeks.

We talk with leaders from the region 6 Healthcare Coalition on West Michigan Week.

(upbeat music) Thank you for joining us on West Michigan Week.

The pandemic continues.

The first U.S Omicron case was reported December 1st here in the U.S, and not long after Michigan's first case was detected right here in Kent County.

But prior to that in mid-November, the Region 6 Healthcare Coalition consisting of 13 counties issued a letter that healthcare systems within the region, were at a tipping point.

Here to discuss the current situation is Dr. Jerry Evans, he's medical director for the Region 6 Healthcare Coalition.

And Luke Aurner, whose healthcare coordinator with the Region 6 Healthcare Coalition, thank you both for being here.

This is the time of year when friends and family gather indoors that can mean holiday parties at home, or at bars, and restaurants.

We're recording this program December 20th.

It airs in about nine days, and again on January 2nd, will the Omicron variant be the dominant strain by the time this program airs?

- That's a good question, and the answer is we don't know for sure.

We do know that Omicron in areas where multiple people are getting it, is doubling about every three days.

And so that could easily take over the area by then.

Will it be the dominant strain by nine days from now?

Probably not, but it will certainly be spreading, and certainly be growing in our area.

- There are some concerns, departing NIH director, Sir Francis Collins, over the weekend warning the U.S could see 1 million cases per day.

That's not a good sign considering the number of Delta hospitalizations that we already have, and the flu season.

- Yes, and that's our biggest concern right now.

Now, fortunately right now, as we speak in West Michigan, the Delta variant seems to be on a downward trend at the moment, but that's only over the last week, and that's not a long trend at all.

So Luke has some data he can go over on that a little bit.

But the bottom line is that Omicron is highly contagious.

It's probably eight to times times more contagious than Delta.

And it is also contagious to those who have even had the vaccination or have had COVID in the past.

The good news is that the vaccines, at least from what the data that we have right now, which is very early, seems to indicate that the vaccine will help keep you out of the hospital, or at least keep you from getting severely ill in most cases.

Now that's especially true if you've had the booster vaccine, but the third dose of the Omicron, I'm sorry, the third dose of the RNA vaccine.

And that seems to be reasonably protective in the very early data.

But unfortunately this early data is not in peer reviewed studies yet, it's data that's being published, and put out there, but we don't have good review of all the data yet.

So it's very early in the process.

- And there's been some UK researchers too, who are saying potentially the Omicron might be just as severe as Delta, but that's still yet to be determined as well.

- Yes, it's too early to tell.

South Africa has been reporting that the disease process is not as bad, but again, it's way too early for us to tell exactly what that's gonna do, and how that would affect a large population of people.

- Before we get further into this discussion, the Region 6 Healthcare Coalition, there's a history here, there's a reason why the two of you are on this program, why the region exists, and it goes back to 9/11.

Just to explain to folks what Region 6 is, and what it is that you do, and why you're issuing these warnings now for hospitals and our healthcare system that as we mentioned early in the program, at a tipping point?

I mean, things are looking dire right now.

- So I'm gonna go back and cover some of the history and I'll let Luke take on the present, because he's been with us a couple of years.

But, back in 9/11, when that occurred, EMS agencies, hospitals, all kinds of agencies that deal with medical care did not communicate with each other very well at all.

We didn't practice things together, we didn't test things together, we didn't even have radio systems that communicate well with each other.

And that was true in Michigan as well.

And so it was a rude awakening for all of us after 9/11.

In 2002, the federal government started pouring money into states and saying, "Look, all hospitals and EMS agencies need to get ready for another major disaster."

Well, at the time they were focused on terrorism.

Now, here in West Michigan and in Michigan in general, we weren't as concerned about terrorism, although it certainly was on our radar, but we really thought, we really should look at an all hazards approach.

Because we have weather issues, we have tornadoes, we have ice storms, we have big car crashes, we have lots of things that can happen.

And so we really took an all hazards approach.

The State of Michigan did a really nice job of setting it up so that there was an office of disaster preparedness.

And that office within MDHHS now, was set up in the same jurisdictions as the Michigan State Police disaster regions, which was a really good plan.

Because what that did is allowed us to really plan with the police, with law enforcement, and work together in those areas.

Now, the other thing is that Michigan was one of the few states that actually had a medical director for each of those regions.

So we have eight regions, and each of those regions has a medical director, a full-time coordinator, and a full-time assistant coordinator.

And I'm gonna let Luke kind of take over from there as to what's happened over the last few years, but that's how the history of this started.

- So in Region 6, we work primarily with all medical entities.

Our groups include hospitals, long-term care, and congregate care facilities, as well as emergency medical services.

We work very closely with emergency management.

And together, what we do is we try to help all facilities, prepare, plan, train, and respond to all disasters.

Through the pandemic, primarily what we've been trying to do is help coordinate the information.

There's been a lot of information coming out.

In the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like information was changing every other minute.

So, our role was to really help streamline getting that information to the people who needed it.

Also at the beginning, when there was a really large PPE shortage of masks, specifically N95s, and gowns, and gloves.

The federal government gave a lot of their stockpiled PPE to the states, and the State of Michigan gave it to the Healthcare Coalitions to distribute appropriately.

So, one of our largest responsibilities was to give PPE appropriately to all of our partners.

And our partners wound up really benefiting from that, because we were able to get them the supplies that they were not able to get from the normal supply chain.

- I think the key to this is the communication between the organizations, is so much better now.

Before, hospitals didn't practice things together, they didn't do things together.

Now, immediately when something happens, they all come together and say, "Okay, how are we gonna get through this as a region?

How are we gonna do this?"

And they're partners now, and yes they're competitors, but they're also partners.

And that is a critical element that was lacking back in 2001.

- Well, and that's what caught our attention.

This was a news release from November 16th.

I think I had mentioned to you doctor that the time we had heard from the coalition was at the beginning of the pandemic.

So when a news release like this comes out, and the words are that our individual and collective resources are being overwhelmed, that's serious stuff.

If it's coming from Region 6, and you, and you're coordinating all this, people should take notice.

What is the situation that we're seeing?

There are some people that are still, in a suspended reality that don't believe these things are happening in our hospitals, but they are, and it's really happening.

- You know, that's a good point.

I think that one of the things that's important to understand is that, Region 6 is not a political organization, it has nothing to do with politics.

In fact, we avoid politics at all costs.

We are strictly a healthcare coordinating agency that works with all our hospitals, EMS agencies, to try to get information out, and to work with them, to support them in every way we can.

We're not a command and control agency either, we don't control the hospitals.

What we do is we work together to coordinate things, and we really work to try to get people working together and cooperating together.

So when we come out with data and information, we're bringing information from our own hospitals.

This is not coming from the federal government.

This is data that's coming from our hospitals, our agencies, our people, your neighbors, and these are the people that are saying these things.

And look has a bunch of statistics here that if you wanna go through those.

But, what we're saying is that our hospitals are overwhelmed right now, and have been for the last couple of months honestly.

They have been swamped with patients, we're trying desperately to keep all of our other surgeries going as well as much as we can, although that's had to be curtailed quite a bit.

But they've really worked hard to try to take care of, not only the COVID patients, but a lot of other people who have been very, very ill because during the first part of the pandemic, the first wave, we had to put off a lot of surgeries, and a lot of things, and that caused a lot of illnesses.

And people avoided hospitals and avoided medical care.

And so there's a lot of illness out there that, hopefully we can try to mitigate the cause or the problems from that, but it's tough.

- You have the aging baby boomers are a part of this, right?

I mean, that's part of the population that needs healthcare more than anybody else right now.

And I believe you mentioned that during that news conference.

- Yeah, and at the end of that baby boomer group.

So, I definitely want that health care to be out there.

But I would say that that is true.

I mean, there's a huge number of people in the 60 to 80 age group who have medical diseases and medical problems.

And we have sustained, we have improved medical care so much in the last 15, 20, 30 years, that those people are doing okay, but they still need medical care.

There are still things that have to happen, to keep them going and doing the things they're doing.

So that just takes time.

And unfortunately, some of that has had to be put off for a while.

So I would say that right now, the number of people that are sick is high.

And the number of people available to take care of them is low.

And that's part of that whole baby boomer issue as well, because there's a lot of younger people, or a lot of baby boomers are now retiring, getting out of medicine.

And a lot of the younger people they're working, but they're not as many of them.

And so our hospitals are struggling with finding enough nurses, finding enough aids and technicians, dietary people, for all kinds of assistance that are needed.

- Luke, Dr. Evans said that you had some data there that you were to share with us.

- I do, so just to put it in perspective, now our latest numbers are coming from yesterday, because hospital reporting isn't in today yet in order to give you that information.

But on December 1st, hospitals admitted 602 new COVID positive patients.

So in the past 18 days on December 19th, they then on December 19th only admitted 394, which sounds pretty good.

And then back on December 7th, we had 87 deaths as our peak number of deaths that we had in the region.

And then recently on December 19th, we've seen only 73 deaths.

- And so, it's Michigan data.

That's still Michigan.

- This is Michigan, sorry.

So this sounds great, but you couple this with then the staffing issues of the hospitals.

And you know, it doesn't seem like a lot of patients, but just in Region 6, 112 of those patients were just in our hospitals here now.

Granted it's gone down to 60 patients that we admitted yesterday, but that's 60 patients in one day.

So you couple that with staff members getting sick, people not wanting to work anymore and retiring, not getting into the field.

And we're starting to feel a large crunch.

Luckily we are seeing that our death rate is going down in Region 6 on December 7th, we had 16 total deaths where yesterday we had a total number of five, total deaths for the day.

But any death to this disease when it might be preventable, is too many.

So, and we're trying really, really hard to decrease that as much as possible.

- How do you get through to everyone?

It seems like we have a very split society on how to approach this pandemic.

And you're talking about how to get through to people, how to get everybody on the same page.

What is it gonna take?

'Cause human behavior is just human behavior, right?

Some people are gonna do what they wanna do, and it doesn't matter, they have their freedoms.

I know people who have had the virus, and they've been asymptomatic, or they've had mild symptoms and they've been fine.

I know other people who have lost loved ones.

So, it's the personal experiences in all of this.

But lost sometimes is the effects on others who are doing the caring.

- Sure, that's very, very true.

I think that our personnel in our ICU's, our nurses in our ICU's are extremely stressed, because they have been taking care of patients for sometimes weeks and then they die.

And a lot of those deaths are preventable right now because if the vaccine has been successful against the Delta variant.

And in fact, if you look at our vaccinated versus unvaccinated numbers in Region 6, about 80% of our hospitalized patients right now are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.

90% of our ICU patients are unvaccinated, or partially vaccinated.

And 99.5 to 6% of our deaths are unvaccinated patients.

So, what we're saying is that, these are not numbers coming from the federal government, these are not numbers coming from anybody but your local hospitals, these are your neighbors, these are your people who you go to church with, who you go to the store with, who you play football game with.

These are your neighbors, and these are the people that are caring for these patients who are dying, many of them probably unnecessarily.

But the stress and the strain on the families who are losing these people, the stress and the strain on the hospital personnel.

If you are an ICU nurse, and person, after person, after person is dying in your ICU, and you know that they didn't have to, or at least a significant number of them didn't have to, that's a huge burden for you.

You just struggle with that because ... And our ICU nurses are quitting, because they're feeling overwhelmed with this.

And this is true in all hospitals, all around the country, not just Michigan.

But ICU nurses are quitting because they're saying, "I can't deal with this.

We're not making these people well, necessarily."

If you get intubated, if you have enough on a ventilator with COVID, your chance of survival is well under 50%.

And so it's a tough road for these nurses and the physicians taking care of these people.

Especially when they know that if they have been vaccinated, yes, they might've still been hospitalized, but they probably wouldn't have been intubated, and they probably wouldn't be on a ventilator, and they probably wouldn't have died, or at least significant number of them.

So it's very, very hard for the people who are taking care of these folks.

And I can't stress this enough that we are not politicians coming to you with numbers that we're trying to convince you otherwise.

We are healthcare workers who are coming to you and saying, "Please help us out, help your family out."

- I have to ask, and you're living this every day, but you've brought up politics a couple of times, what is happening inside the hospitals?

Because you have mentioned this.

I have not had to step foot in a hospital, during this pandemic.

That's not true, I had a surgery.

But what is taking place?

- Yeah, it's not politics in the hospital.

We don't care if you're Republican Democrat or anybody else, it has nothing to do with it.

In the hospital, we're just trying desperately to take care of every person we've passed, we can take care of.

- But are there attitudes that are coming into the hospital, I guess, is what I'm asking, right?

- Sure, we some of that.

- Employees have to deal with.

- We see some of that.

Absolutely, we see some people who are ...

It's mostly not the politics of it, it's the vaccinators versus the unvaccinated.

And the arguments about that from patients and families.

Most of the hospital staff is very much in favor of the vaccination, and have received vaccinations.

And in fact, almost all of our hospitals staff have received vaccinations.

So, that's not an issue there.

The politics of it is that people don't trust politicians.

We know that, we understand that, I get it.

But, this is not politician coming to you saying these things, "These are your neighbors.

I live in this community, I work here.

We are, and our nurses, and our physicians live here and work here, and that's why we're coming to you and saying, "Help us out, help yourself out.

- And you know who's vaccinated and who is not right?

Because each vaccine has a key code on it, right?

It's coded.

And you know, whether or not whose arm it went into, and it's registered somewhere.

So there's not some idea of, "Oh, they're just saying it's the unvaccinated at the hospitals."

You know who's vaccinated and who's not.

- Most of the people at our hospitals live in the area.

And so they're part of our healthcare systems.

For example, Spectrum Health or Trinity Health, they have a number of hospital outpatient clinics who take care of patients as an outpatient.

So that's registered in that system, and we know that they are or are not vaccinated, or personally vaccinated or whatever.

So, we can tell that in most cases, our patients will tell us.

Patients are very honest about it, they're not gonna lie about it.

If they're unvaccinated they tell us.

And if they're vaccinated they tell us.

And we're not critical.

Nobody here in a hospital is going to bad mouth somebody because they're unvaccinated or because their vaccinated, that's not our goal.

We're gonna do our absolute best to take care of every one of those people, no matter what their status is, because that's not our role, right?

Our role is to take care of people.

But if you have something that could prevent that, and prevent you from getting to that level, we would love you to take your take advantage of that.

- So what's next?

What is next for the system?

What is next for our general population?

Where are things heading and what do we need to do?

- So right at the moment ... Yeah, go ahead, Luke.

- Right at the moment, I can tell you what we're preparing for.

We're preparing for a collision of the Delta variant, the flu, and the Omicron variant.

What that looks like, we don't know exactly.

But, what we do know is that it could be potentially bad enough that it would completely overwhelm all of our health systems, all of our providers, and all of our equipment.

Having agreements and co-operations with all the health services, as well as the State of Michigan, we have been preparing ourselves with ventilators, oxygen equipment, high flow oxygen machines, making sure that our hospitals are flush with that equipment and know how to reach out and get additional staffing is a huge problem.

So, all the hospitals are really looking at their staffing models and trying to figure out the best way to maximize care with the minimal amount of staffing that they have.

And we talk about COVID, and Delta, and the flu, and Omicron variant.

But we also have to remember that everything else is still going on.

People are still having strokes.

People are still having heart attacks.

People still need surgeries, emergency surgeries.

There are still car accidents.

So, when you add the normal healthcare workload, and then have COVID, and the flu, and the Omicron, and all these things that we really don't know what's going on and how it's going to happen, it's very difficult to exactly prepare for.

So, we're preparing for the worst and hoping for the best at this point.

- (indistinct) I think one of the things that we're also very worried about is that because Omicron and influenza can affect hospital workers, just like everybody else.

If we lose 15 to 20% of our staff to Omicron or influenza, not dead, but just having to stay home because they're sick, that's a huge loss.

How do we deal with that?

How do we possibly survive that kind of thing?

And so the point is that we're our role as Region 6 Healthcare Coalitions, to prepare for the worst, we always plan for the worst.

And so, that's what we do.

And so, we're always planning six to eight weeks down the road, or beyond, and trying to figure that out.

Luke's role is really to be planning, and thinking ahead, and getting things ready for whatever may come, we hope it doesn't.

But again, we plan for the worst.

- We know that there have been some federal healthcare teams that have come to the state, I think three hospitals now.

There's talk of the national guard being called in.

How dire situation does it have to be when we get there?

- So the problem with the national guard is the national guard is our people, doctors, and nurses that work in hospitals, that's who the national guard is.

- Right, right.

Yeah, you're right.

- So, you can't pull people from the national guard, to work in another hospital because you're just taking from somebody else.

So, the national guard is a great group of people, and they have people who are non-clinical could potentially help, but that's not who we need, we need nurses, and we need respiratory therapists.

And those people are already working in hospitals right now.

So, that's why the DOD teams are here, because they are ... That's what their role is, is to go to places where there's critical needs.

But only the national guard is not a good answer because that just pulls it out of one hospital and sends it to another.

- And the DOD teams, there are not many DOD teams out there.

The DOD teams that we have, were the only ones that were available at this time.

So, I mean, it's a scarce resource at this time.

- Gentlemen, it'll be back soon, I have (indistinct).

Dr. Jerry Evans and Luke Aurner with the Healthcare Coalition here in Region 6.

Thank you both so much for joining us.

- [Dr. Jerry] Thank you.

- And thank you for joining us, we'll see you again soon.

(upbeat music)