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Fear of COVID-19 exposure kept many patients away from doctors’ appointments and hospital tests. But one local cardiologist said that delayed checkups may have caused serious harm to people with underlying conditions because of undetected changes.
Dr. Ronald Fields, who practices at St. Mary Medical Center and is director of the cardiac catheterization lab, said he’s already seen such conditions as worsening heart failure and unstable blood pressure cases that could have been avoided with regular checkups. And complications, as a result of neglect, could lead to further organ damage down the road, he said.
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“I don’t understand it because doctors’ offices were probably the safest places to go. Most staffs were observing the CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control) guidelines, wearing masks, disinfecting, and observing distancing procedure,” Fields said.
He cited two peaks in hospitalizations around the winter holidays, attributed to family gatherings, but the patient census declined after that. Fields is reassured by the introduction of vaccines, but if people are not getting checked, risk factors are not addressed, leading to damage to the heart, the physician said.
If there was any glimmer of light in the dark months, it was that the numbers of heart attacks and strokes dropped. Heart attacks went down 23 percent; strokes by 20 percent, according to figures from the CDC and the Virginia Department of Health.
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Before COVID-19, heart attacks occurred every 40 seconds in the United States, and the number of strokes averaged 750,000 annually, according to the American Heart Association and the CDC.
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“People were working at home so they had less stress, they exercised more, and were better at taking their pills. There was less air pollution because fewer cars were on the road, and manufacturing plants were shut down” Fields said.
Still, what the CDC called “excessive deaths” because of skipped medical care still mars the landscape. Excessive deaths reflect an increase of deaths that normally occur within a specific time period. Fields said that his research showed that, in the first four months of the pandemic, one in three deaths were due to delayed care.
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Vaccines are another concern for Fields. Approximately 79.4 million Americans have had at least one dose of the vaccine. Of that number, 41 percent are fully vaccinated. Still, there are vaccine resisters. At least one-third of the U.S. population are skeptical. Fields urges the skeptics to get the shot.
“We will be dealing with the implications of this pandemic for years to come. There is more benefit than harm from the vaccine,” he said.
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