AUSTIN, Texas — According to doctors in emergency rooms, the fear over contracting coronavirus and warnings to stay home have had an unintended consequence: people with medical emergencies are not getting necessary help at hospitals and emergency rooms.
"Just the other night, a lady with severe abdominal pain [came in]," Dr. Diana Fite, Texas Medical Association's newest president, said. "She had waited five days with appendicitis. In the meantime, it had ruptured and she was in very serious shape. All because she was afraid to come in and be exposed to coronavirus."
Dr. Fite works in an emergency room based in Houston. While the evidence that people are avoiding ERs and hospitals to try and prevent contracting COVID-19 is anecdotal, she isn't exactly surprised people are doing so.
In fact, Fite said the largest demographic of people avoiding the ER is seniors.
"All they're hearing is that they are so prone to having the worst outcome if they get coronavirus, and they should stay put," Fite said. "We are certainly seeing those in the categories of stroke symptoms, chest pain, things like that."
Fite said this should not be an issue at all.
"Ironically, everyone is being so protected, [patients] may be a little safer in the emergency department than in the store or certainly at the beach or somewhere like that," Fite said.
In Austin, an ER doctor is seeing the same. Again, because of anecdotal evidence, she believes the issue is starting to go down.
"Once [patients] come in late and we need to admit them for prolonged admissions, the risk, as you can imagine, gets higher and higher for contracting nosocomial or hospital-acquired infections," Dr. Natasha Kathuria, an ER doctor with Austin Emergency Center, said. "It would actually be better if somebody comes in early because then if it's not severe, we can send them home, and they would not run the risk of contracting it in the ER at all."
Fite said emergency rooms are seeing more patients with severe consequences of treatable problems than before the COVID-19 outbreak.
"We're not seeing a lot of the more minor things at all," Fite said. "At the same time when patients do come in, they are very ill. They are much worse than they used to be so you can definitely see the trends."
Going forward, Fite, Kathuria and EMS personnel across Texas want to remind patients COVID-19 is not an excuse to avoid the ER. When arriving, patients still should be wearing masks and social distancing. Kathuria even recommends not sitting near anyone in the waiting area as a way to accommodate social distancing.
PEOPLE ARE ALSO READING: