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Dr. Andre Campbell, Professor of Surgery at UCSF & ICU, Physician and Trauma Surgeon at Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss impact of increasing COVID cases -19 on California State Hospitals.
Video transcript
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SEANA SMITH: Coronavirus cases are on the rise in the United States with hospitalizations exceeding 90,000 for the first time, hitting a record for the 17th consecutive day. To find out more, we would like to invite Dr. Andre Campbell. He is professor of surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, also trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
And Dr. Campbell, nice to have you on the program. More and more people, as we have seen from these figures, are being admitted to hospitals. I’m curious to give us an overview of the current situation in your hospital and what the city of San Francisco is facing right now.
SECOND CAMPBELL: Well, first of all, good morning, and thank you very much for inviting me. And a happy late Thanksgiving. So I’m just going to say that in California we had things a little different than the rest of the country. We’ve had ups and downs, but now we’re starting to skyrocket. So in my hospital we haven’t had a strong push yet, although we’re kind of starting the ramp.
So we have about 15-20 patients in our hospital with COVID, which is different from a lot of parts of the country, certainly different from Southern California. Southern California has cases at a much higher rate. They have about 5,000 cases a day in Los Angeles. And they’re starting to have a huge push over there.
The positivity rate is high, the number of cases is high. And it goes up, which gives us a break because we’re all connected. And we are all very worried that the system will be overwhelmed with patients because the resources we have are simply limited, but the number of patients we have can be endless because COVID does not take vacations. COVID-19 is with us all the time.
And we are very worried about this trip that takes place around Thanksgiving. 6 million people have traveled in the past six days. This means that a lot more people will be exposed to different pods. And we told people to stay home and not to move around, but what happened was people did the opposite, because it’s okay for people to want to be with their family.
But we must hold on because hope is coming. The vaccine is coming. But we may be facing an apocalypse by Christmas because of what is happening with the increasing number of cases, higher than now. 90,000 is a lot, but what if we have 150,000? So, there are those of us who take care of patients who really care.
MYLES ABROAD: And Dr. Campbell, I’m wondering where you think the post type went down. Because I was talking about it with someone last night. In March, we all understood that it was about reducing the pressure on the hospital system.
And for now, it seems that flattening or bending part of the conversation just isn’t a priority. And yet, as you describe here, it is the whole project, isn’t it, to keep the hospital resources available. Where does it seem to you that most Americans may have gotten lost?
SECOND CAMPBELL: Well I think what happened was simple things like wearing a mask, social distancing, washing your hands, that got buried in a political discussion about, well, it’s my freedom to don’t wear a mask, but what happens is all of these common things. suddenly became political. And when they get political, then it gets a lot more loaded as opposed to, let me protect you, I’ll protect us, and then sort of go from there.
So you have 266,000 deaths, and it is predicted that if we continue our trajectory, maybe 350,000 deaths. And I think the breakdown was that things got a little more politicized than they should be. It shouldn’t be political to wear a mask. If you wear a mask, it protects me, it protects you.
But everyone is saying, well the masks are not working, things are bad. Now I’m a surgeon and I wear a mask all the time, right? In fact, now I wear two masks and a face shield all the time when I am at work. And I can breathe well, and that’s fine. But I’m just telling you that what happened was that there was an outage in March.
New York’s hospital systems were therefore totally overwhelmed. And that’s why so many people died. Over 33,000 people in the north have died in New York state because things were overwhelmed. The specter of having refrigerated trucks carrying the remains of our loved ones, or your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, shocked us.
And I think what happened was part of the country, I feel like they were spared. But the reality is that they were spared then, but right now things are on fire. The case rate in North Dakota is 150 per 100,000 population. In California, it’s 31 per 100,000 people. It’s because we have 41 million people here.
So the positivity rate of cases is increasing, isn’t it, compared to what it was before. So these are things that worry us all as we go along, because help is on the way, but we have to hold on. And people didn’t follow simple instructions. And that has been a problem.
SEANA SMITH: Dr Campbell, it almost seems like a fit within a fit. As we get more and more people, more and more patients infected with COVID, who have been – they call themselves long haul. So they have these lasting symptoms once they are cured by COVID. They still face some of these side effects. How does this complicate the ability of physicians to provide care and really help those who suffer for weeks and months afterwards?
SECOND CAMPBELL: So that’s an interesting thing. So what happened is if you think about it like that the virus is like a bomb exploding in your system. It turns on the inflammation. It targets the lungs, joints, heart, brain, bloodstream, causing blood clots. So there are many things going on that can lead to your death.
Now, if you get well, we get better with the remdesivir, with the steroids, with the antibodies that were given even to the president. So things get better with that, right? But what happens is that once you recover, people still have problems with fatigue, not being able to walk.
So, for example, if you’re a long-distance runner and you’ve run for miles, all of a sudden you can’t walk two blocks. So what’s happened is there’s a bunch of rehabilitation doctors and primary care doctors trying to figure out what it is.
There is now a clinic that has been opened at New York University Hospital where they are trying to figure out exactly what symptoms are related and how we can affect those symptoms and improve them. But we are still learning things even after nine months of this pandemic, which is a 100-year pandemic, compared to what it was before. We are learning new things every day.
The long wearer is the second shoe to drop. The acute phase, hospitalization, crushing nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists is a phase. And the first thing in the second phase is that once you recover, even if you have a mild case, you can be a long carrier. So we need to learn more information, collect data in order to understand how we could overcome this, because we are still learning things about this virus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, every day.
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