It's been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in Lane County. The medical community is reflecting on mistakes made as well as what went right.
Dr. Bob Pelz is Medical Director for Infection Prevention for PeaceHealth Oregon and a member of the Governor’s COVID-19 Medical Advisory Panel.
He said his first talks in January 2020 intimated the virus appeared isolated to China. By April, he presented data showing the United States had the greatest number of cases in the world.
Pelz noted how naïve and misinformed doctors were at the outset. One issue was testing--or the lack of it.
“We had a patient in the emergency room, early in the epidemic, who had just gotten off a plane from China and had a fever,” he said. “And I was on the phone with somebody from CDC who told me they would not allow me to test her because the patient’s temperature was a couple tenths of a degree too low.”
By April of last year, Pelz said Peacehealth laboratories had purchased enough testing equipment to be completely self-sufficient for managing inpatients—with turn-around times in a matter of days or hours. Since then, they’ve performed 93,000 tests in Lane County.
From the drugs used to take care of patients to modes of transmission and the importance of masking, Dr. Pelz said over a short period of time, these matters became better understood.
While the impact of new variant viruses remains unclear, Pelz said there is plenty to applaud, including the development of an effective vaccine within the first months of the pandemic.