The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Years ago, hospitals were meant to be places to rest, convalesce from illness, and stay sequestered from society and from home. Some locals will remember that the Tucson Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and St. Mary’s Hospital, both used to be TB sanitariums. When I was a medical student, patients were sometimes admitted to the hospital for “exhaustion” for testing, and stayed there for weeks. Times are different now.
Keeping this in mind, fast-forward to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Just today, I treated a patient who related to me a cautionary tale.
A family member was in the hospital with pneumonia, and was tested for COVID-19 and sent home. A few hours after he arrived home, the phone call came: your test is positive. The doctor’s order was: “Stay home!” What happened next is predictable, based on what scientists already know happens on cruise ships, navy ships, and other shared living environments. Everyone else in the family subsequently became ill, and eventually tested positive for COVID-19. Everyone was contagious before they were quarantined, and everyone in the family was in direct contact with numerous other members of the community.
We are now on the cusp of opening up commerce in Arizona, and testing for the virus is finally becoming widely available, so we can identify cases.
However there is a glaring omission in our approach to this disease. There is no convalescence center for any positive cases. But we shouldn’t use modern-day hospitals for this.
We should repurpose empty, closed hospitals, and empty convention centers, to allow for sequestration from society and home, and convalescence. This also would allow for proper monitoring of cases for complications, so that people are not dying unattended in their homes or calling 911 way too late.
And most importantly, it would prevent disease transmission much more effectively than our current system.
One may say that this is unnecessary, as our culture is one of self-reliance and self-responsibility, and two months ago I would have agreed. But let me give you the perspective that you may not have heard before.
As a primary care physician, I hear every day the reasons why people do not abide by medically mandated quarantines: broken air conditioning when the temperature outside is over 100 degrees, dogs that have escaped, children that need care, elders that need care, homes that have run out of food, cars that have broken down.
So paradoxically, attempts to sequester patients at home often results additional spread of the infection to the rest of the family and then out to the local community.
This is why we used to have sanitariums — to break the chain of communicable diseases. This is why now we need COVID-19 convalescence facilities. When you cut disease transmission in the community, everyone wins. Call your representatives at the city, county, state and federal levels. Call our governor. This is important.
