Ayne Amjad, West Virginia’s state medical officer, said she doesn’t believe COVID-19 is a particularly deadly illness. What is deadly, she continued, is our inability to fully understand and fight the virus.
“I don’t think COVID is that deadly, if we have a system in place. I don’t think it’s a deadly disease. I really don’t — if we have enough testing available; if we can get the people who are sick treated fast enough and if we have a way to know what is contagious and what’s not contagious,” Amjad said.
“I don’t see us being a masked society forever, but right now, until we get things under control, we have to do certain things.”
Getting things under control is precisely what prompted Amjad and West Virginia COVID-19 Czar Clay Marsh to meet remotely with local officials last week.
Monongalia County has seen COVID-19 numbers spike since July 1, particularly among young people between ages 18-29. The county now has about a third of the state’s active cases with WVU’s fall semester about a month away.
“Not only are they student age, but they’re people who can afford to travel. They like to go out — not only to the bars. They like to go to the beach. They like to go out with friends, whether that’s to Pittsburgh, D.C.,” Amjad said. “These are what I call community spreaders. Young people of a certain socioeconomic background.”
Monongalia County Board of Health President Sam Chico pointed to Centers for Disease Control numbers indicating pneumonia and influenza are more deadly to people under age 34 — many of whom present as asymptomatic for COVID-19.
“The numbers we’re seeing as far as positive tests are startling. I do understand that. I don’t want anything to spiral out of control. But our census in our medical facilities is completely manageable,” Chico said, suggesting it may be better in the long term for low-risk populations to “get it and get it over with as soon as possible.”
“People, especially over 65, are highly vulnerable and need to be protected … but the rest of the world, at a certain point, has got to function. Everybody needs to hope and pray for a vaccine, but I don’t think we can bet the future on it.”
Marsh pushed back on that notion on multiple fronts, pointing out that more and more young people are contracting COVID-19 and ending up in intensive care, though he conceded that there is a link between severe cases and smoking in young people.
“So this idea that COVID is safe in young people and they should just get it and get it over with, I think that’s going to be proven to be a fallacy,” Marsh said, pointing to lingering questions about antibodies and chances of reinfection.
Maybe more critical, Marsh said, is that it’s impossible to concede a portion of the population without putting the entire population at risk.
He pointed to Sweden as an example, explaining the country has remained open and put its emphasis on trying to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. The result, he said, was a death rate between five and 20 times its Scandinavian neighbors.
“That’s because it spreads. Once you have COVID in your community that’s deeply penetrated, you can’t control it,” Marsh said.
Marsh went on to say the best way to protect people and the most effective way to keep the economy running is to keep the numbers down — even if that means retreating when the situation dictates.
“If you can control the COVID activity in your community, the economy gets better. If people are scared they’re going to die or get sick from going out, nobody goes out,” he said. “So I think this idea that we can either keep our economy open or we can try to protect people’s health, I actually think that’s not true. I think that by protecting our health and reducing the amount of COVID we have in our communities, that’s how we benefit our economy.”
Ultimately, Amjad said there are still too many unknowns to understand why some healthy people never know they’ve had COVID-19 while others get critically ill.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough research and science to know why that is,” she said. “So we have to do these little baby steps in order to get enough time to do that research.”
There have been five deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Monongalia County — all occurring between April 3 and May 2 and claiming victims between the ages of 76 and 100 years old.
According to Monongalia County Health Officer Lee Smith, all five had some variation of Alzheimer’s disease. All five were tied to an outbreak in a long-term care facility and three were receiving hospice, or end of life, care.
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