436 - The Primary Care of COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
At the beginning of the pandemic, primary care clinicians had few treatments to offer patients who had COVID-19 but were not sick enough to be hospitalized. But they could provide emotional support and steer patients away from harmful treatments. Dr. Pieter Cohen, a primary care doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about all that primary care clinicians can do for COVID-19 patients today.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.3 | Today, we talk about the treatment of COVID-19 in primary care. My guest is Dr. Peter Cohen, |
| 0:49.3 | associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and a primary care doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. |
| 0:55.2 | Dr. Cohen has co-authored a widely used set of practice recommendations for doctors |
| 0:59.9 | caring for COVID patients outside the hospital. Let's listen. Dr. Peter Cohen, thank you so |
| 1:06.3 | much for joining me to talk about the primary care treatment of people with COVID. You're a primary care |
| 1:14.1 | doctor? I am, Josh. And when this whole pandemic on the wave came to us in Boston, all our clinics |
| 1:22.3 | shut down. And at that time, we opened up one clinic that was just for respiratory fevers and went to work |
| 1:30.6 | there. |
| 1:31.6 | And I've been working there ever since. |
| 1:33.0 | So just over the last couple of years, how many patients do you think with COVID or symptoms |
| 1:38.5 | of COVID you've taken care of? |
| 1:40.5 | Oh, our team is taking care of thousands of patients with symptomatic COVID. |
| 1:45.7 | These are patients usually who are not quite sick enough yet to require hospitalization or the emergency department. |
| 1:52.5 | So they come and see us. |
| 1:53.9 | But the majority of patients, of course, are cared for by our telephonic care, so a big system that's managing patients at home. So we see patients quite sick, |
| 2:03.7 | but not sick enough to require hospitalization. And what you've been able to offer has just |
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