353 - How Delta and Low Vaccination Rates are Feeding a Deadly Surge of COVID-19 in Missouri
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a drop in COVID hospitalizations and deaths over the spring and early summer, hospitals in southwest Missouri are at capacity again. Steve Edwards, president and CEO of Cox Health which has six hospitals in the region, talks with Stephanie Desmon about why things are so much more extreme now than they were last winter, how the politicization of public health has choked efforts to make vaccines more accessible, and why this fight is so personal for him.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.5 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:50.5 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Steve Edwards, president and CEO of Cox Health, which has six hospitals in southwest Missouri. |
| 0:59.9 | They discuss the COVID search that is happening in his part of the country, fed by the Delta variant and very low vaccination rates. |
| 1:07.9 | They thought COVID-19 was gone. Now it's at its highest levels ever. Let's listen. |
| 1:15.1 | Steve Edwards, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Glad to be on the show. |
| 1:19.2 | So I wanted to talk to you about what's been going on where you are in southwest Missouri. |
| 1:23.6 | You know, you had a COVID reprieve for a fairly long period of months, but now the virus is roaring back. |
| 1:30.3 | How are things compared to the winter? |
| 1:32.3 | You know, I think they're actually more extreme than the winter for us now. |
| 1:36.2 | I looked at our data from Friday through the weekend, we lost 15 more lives at Cox Health alone. |
| 1:41.3 | I think the big difference for us is the almost explosive ramping up of volume. |
| 1:47.2 | And so what may have taken seven or eight months in the first waves took about seven weeks. |
| 1:53.6 | So we went from about 14 patients in house, 14 to 20 patients in house in our system to as high as 165. And it's been kind of holding |
| 2:03.8 | steady at that number. But I think it's holding steady because we're just out of capacity, |
| 2:08.8 | trying to find, you know, other locations for patients because we're so full. |
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