Nearly 700 Henry Ford Health System employees have tested positive for the coronavirus in the last seven days, the system’s chief clinical officer said Tuesday.
That’s about 2% of approximately 33,000 employees in the health system that became the first in Michigan to announce last summer that it would mandate COVID-19 vaccines for its workers.
The news comes as COVID-19 cases surge in Michigan and across the country, the highly transmissible omicron variant becomes more dominant, and short-staffed hospitals and testing locations continue to be overrun.
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“If we have an ill employee, they are quarantined until seven days after their first symptom appeared, but they also have to have improvement in their symptoms. If they’re still febrile or no improvement at all, we keep them off work because our first priority is to make sure that we don’t infect our patients,” said Dr. Dennis Cunningham, the health system’s medical director of infection control and prevention.
He said the health system could move to a five-day quarantine under new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was recently adopted by the state health department, if need be.
In October, the health system said about 400 workers walked off the job rather than get the vaccine and another 1,900 workers received exemptions from the vaccine mandate.
A spokesman said Tuesday the health system did not have a breakdown of the nearly 700 COVID-19 positive workers by vaccination status, such as vaccinated, vaccinated and boosted or exempted from the mandate.
The health system also has had to temporarily close 97 beds across its hospitals, mostly because of staffing challenges, said Dr. Adnan Munkarah, executive vice president and chief clinical officer.
And because of steep increases in infections in the community, the health system, among others, had to limit monoclonal antibody treatments, which reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from the coronavirus.
Sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody product made by Vir Biotechnology and GlaxoSmithKline, is the only monoclonal antibody therapy on the market in the U.S. that has shown in lab studies to be effective against the omicron variant.
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Cunningham said the health system was down to its last 30 doses of monoclonal antibodies Tuesday, which would be used up by the end of the day. It had to adjust the criteria on who could receive the treatment to those who are most at risk, such as those age 75 and older, those with severe lung disease using extra oxygen and those on dialysis.
Cunningham said the health system was expecting 300 more doses of sotrovimab this week. During a press call, he received a text that more doses had arrived, though he did not know how many.
Cunningham said he anticipated antiviral pills should be available sometime this month, but they, too, may be only used with certain patients because of drug interactions.
He said the drugs would be distributed through Meijer pharmacies and the state is prioritizing southeast Michigan because of the number of cases it has.
“I don’t know the exact numbers of drugs, but Michigan has given us guidance on who to prioritize in terms of patients because the supply is not going to be anywhere near enough for every patient who’s at risk,” Cunningham said. “Eventually, we’ll have more of that drug.”
Still, he said, the treatments are not a substitute for vaccination, which is the best way to protect from infection, hospitalization or dying from COVID-19.
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“Michigan, I believe, as of today, only 60.5% of people 5 years of age and older have been fully vaccinated. That’s going to make this last a little bit longer,” Cunningham said of the state’s fourth surge. “So, that’s why we are very concerned about January. I’m thinking it’s going to be a very rough month in terms of COVID.”
Michigan had 61,235 confirmed COVID-19 cases from Thursday through Monday, averaging about 12,247 per day, according to state data.
As of Monday, the state health department had confirmed 289 omicron cases in Michigan through genetic sequencing, with the majority of them in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties as well as the city of Detroit.
But that’s estimated to be only a small fraction of the total number of cases of the strain in the state.
Dr. Christine Nefcy, chief medical officer of Munson Healthcare, said Tuesday the state is taking about 10% of all the positive tests that are sent to it and sequencing them for the new variants and others.
“It’s a very time-intensive, complicated and expensive process. That’s why we don’t do it for all of the samples that are sent,” she said. “So any data that we have about where omicron is and where it showed up is actually behind the reality.”
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“Typically, we see increases in patients and hospitalizations after holidays. And we are bracing for one of the bleakest months … we have faced throughout this pandemic,” Cunningham said.
“Because we are seeing so much transmission I do want to take a moment to comment on at-home tests. If you have a positive at-home test … you do not need to repeat the test at your doctor’s office or the hospital. The home test while they’re useful … don’t consider (a negative test) a free pass. If you have unknown exposure or feeling like you have symptoms of COVID, please act as if you have COVID until you’re outside the incubation period, which typically we’re talking seven to 10 days. The PCR test is the very best test available for COVID test results and many pharmacies and health departments offer it in addition to hospitals … your own doctor can order one of these tests.”
Munkarah said the biggest challenge regarding testing within the health system is having enough staff to do the nasal swabbing for the increased demand.
Munkarah said as of Tuesday, there were 480 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Henry Ford Health System, a 25% increase from the past week. One of the hospitalizations is a child under 17 years old who was not vaccinated, he said.
As of yesterday, he said, 65% of patients had not been vaccinated and of the 60 patients in the intensive care unit about 65% had not been inoculated against COVID-19.
Munkarah said the health system also made a “very important observation” in the past few days — 95% of patients who are hospitalized or in the ICU had not received a booster vaccine, either.
“It is clear that the booster seemed to have a significant effect in protecting people from getting to the hospital,” he said, also citing studies overseas where booster doses increase protection, including against the omicron variant.
At Munson Healthcare, only 12 of the 76 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were vaccinated, Nefcy said. She said of the 32 patients in the ICU, 30 were not vaccinated, and of the 13 people on ventilators all of them are unvaccinated.
Staff writer Kristen Jordan Shamus contributed to this report.
Contact Christina Hall: chall@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @challreporter.
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