Coroanvirus Pandemic Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

As Pandemic Wanes, Healthcare Providers Still Face COVID Trauma

Whether medical professionals advise it or not, much of the country has returned to normal with regards to the coronavirus pandemic. But hospitals and health care providers are still struggling.

Appalachia Health News Reporter June Leffler spoke with Doug Mitchell, Chief of Nursing for WVU hospitals, about how things are going and where the pandemic is going from here.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Leffler: Over the fall and winter, cases and hospitalizations of COVID-19 were just through the roof. We know it was really hard on hospital staff. Have things gotten better?

Mitchell: So I think they have gotten somewhat better. We know that cases are down. Certainly hospitalizations are down and deaths are down too. But we still have hospitalizations. And we still do have patients dying from COVID. So by and large, things are better, but we’re certainly not out of the woods yet. We still have between probably 1500 and 1800 surgeries that were delayed based on this pandemic. The thinking that we’re kind of back to normal and the hospitals are good to go is really not accurate. We have lots of patients who need care that was deferred. And we’re in a kind of a mini surge right now. We’ve been down to very, very few patients and few staff out. But today, we actually have 13 patients here with active COVID disease, we have 60-some employees out with COVID. So we’re still feeling lots of stress from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Leffler: How are your nurses doing? Did they get to take time off? How are they doing?

Mitchell: It’s an interesting question. We know that 50 percent of nurses in the country are really, really burnt out from this whole thing. And I think we’re probably a fairly good representative of that. Thirty percent of nurses in the country are actively contemplating leaving their work. We have tried to have the ability to disconnect and not be here and take vacations and things like that. And we’re really emphasizing the idea of trying to disconnect when we’re not here, but it’s really hard. Having gone through the two years and some of the units that have seen so much devastation and death, and particularly at times where it seems like it wasn’t all necessary. It’s been really hard on folks. I just heard a story a couple of days ago on NPR about nurses talking about how it seems like, with a lot of folks, it’s just kind of back to normal out there. But there’s all this kind of shared trauma from having gone through this. So I think that folks are doing somewhat better, but we’re still not out of the woods. There’s a lot of healing that needs to happen here in the next few years.

Leffler: So nurses are contemplating leaving the profession and they’ve just had a hard time. What does that look like in terms of numbers and staffing levels?

Mitchell: We’ve always prided ourselves here at J.W. Ruby for being able to take every patient in the state that needs us. We’re the safety net hospital. We’re the academic medical center of our land grant university here at WVU. We’ve always been able to take everyone that needs our help. We have lots of small hospitals in the state and we provide specialty care. Through this pandemic, it’s the first time we’ve not been able to accept patients based on our ability to staff, with the nursing shortage, with lots of nurses leaving to go travel where they can make just incredible salaries.

Leffler: Where do we go from here? What are you planning for?

Mitchell: So first, I’ll just give a little plug. What we need to do is vaccinate, mask and test. Right? I assume most of the listeners right now, based on your demographics, are probably highly vaccinated. I would encourage everyone to do that, to mask still. And to get tested when one’s not feeling well.

It’s a relatively dangerous place to be in a hospital in this country. So we are working diligently to make it safer and more reliable. We want it to be a great place for employees to work, a safe place and emotionally safe place. I think most probably as importantly as anything is to really work with our team to be able to heal, having gone through this very traumatic couple of years of providing care for very, very sick patients and seeing all the death and dying that they’ve seen.

Leffler: Do you see this trauma dissipating?

Mitchell: Yeah, I think I am an optimist. I think we’ve kind of crested and I see light. My background is behavioral health. I did that for 27 years before I got into this particular role. So I think we have this shared trauma that we need to continue to work through and support each other and to make sure it’s okay for people to get care, and to feel comfortable saying “I’m not okay.”

We try to advocate for that here. And we put systems and support in place for that to occur. But there’s still a stigma. People still feel like they don’t want to show weakness or vulnerability, and they toughen it up. They’re tough nurses and physicians and healthcare workers and we want to make it a space where people can understand that what we just went through was really hard and it’s okay. As a matter of fact, it’s, frankly, heroic to ask for help and to ask for assistance.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.

Youngkin, Justice Seek Relief From Health Worker Vax Rule

Warning of hospitals and other health providers facing “an urgent staffing crisis,” the Republican governors of Virginia and West Virginia on Monday asked the Biden administration for a limited waiver to the federal vaccine mandate for health care workers.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled the federal government can proceed with the rule, which covers most health care workers in the U.S. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice acknowledged in a letter Monday that the legal process had left the rule in place but asked for “relief” for rural and state-run facilities.

The governors proposed such relief could come in multiple forms, such as broader conscience exemptions, flexibility on enforcement or a six-month delay in implementation. Without such flexibility, they wrote, the rule will compound existing staffing shortages.

“The impact in Southwest Virginia and throughout West Virginia will be particularly acute. In these rural areas, access to lifesaving care could be threatened and we may displace a generation of healthcare professionals in a region already battling health disparities,” the letter said.

It was sent Monday to Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Justice said at a COVID-19 briefing Monday that while the mandate can be met at hospitals in more populated areas, “it is putting an additional level of strain on our rural hospitals that is just destroying us.”

Justice, who has been a constant bullhorn for vaccinations since the start of the pandemic, announced in December that West Virginia will use $48 million in federal stimulus funding to aggressively recruit and train nurses over the next four years.

The National Guard has also responded to the staffing shortage by sending hundreds of trained members to help at dozens of hospitals along with some long-term nursing and psychiatric facilities.

“We can’t afford to lose anybody. We can’t absolutely afford to be firing people,” Justice said. “We should be respectful of their values. But we should encourage them in every way to be vaccinated. Nevertheless, we can’t shut the hospital down. That’s all there is to it.” he said.

Justice also said Monday he has not received a “substantive” response from the CDC on his request from early January for West Virginians to receive a second booster shot.

About 52% of West Virginia residents are fully vaccinated against the virus and about 61% have received at least one dose. West Virginia has seen the five highest confirmed weekly virus cases during the pandemic in the past five weeks, including nearly 17,700 last week, according to state health figures.

In addition, a record 1,700 people are currently hospitalized for the virus, 69.1 percent of whom are unvaccinated.

Overall vaccination rates are higher in Virginia, where about 79.1 percent of the population has received at least one dose and 68.8 percent are fully vaccinated. The commonwealth has also broken case count and hospitalization records during the latest surge due to the highly contagious omicron variant.

Youngkin, who was sworn in earlier this month, is also a vocal advocate for vaccination efforts, though he opposes vaccine and mask mandates.

He was scheduled to meet Monday afternoon with officials from Ballad Health — a system that serves a swath of northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia, northwest North Carolina and southeast Kentucky — at a hospital in Abingdon. A spokesperson said he planned to discuss the letter with staff there.

Ballad CEO Alan Levine, who has been advising Youngkin on Virginia’s pandemic response, has previously been outspoken about staffing concerns arising from the mandate.

Last week, the health system said it would allow workers who had tested positive for COVID-19 but were asymptomatic to keep working under certain circumstances.

The federal mandate ultimately will cover 10.4 million health care workers at 76,000 facilities. Health care workers in about half the states face a Thursday deadline to get their first dose of the vaccine.

It is taking effect first in jurisdictions that did not challenge the requirement in court. Virginia, which until mid-January was under Democratic control, is among them.

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Rankin reported from Richmond, Virginia.

State Coronavirus Czar Hopeful For New COVID-19 Treatment On Horizon

The state’s coronavirus czar offered support Friday for the announcement by the pharmaceutical company Merck, that progress has been made with a new treatment for COVID-19 called molnupiravir.

Marsh said at Gov. Jim Justice’s coronavirus news conference that the treatment can reduce hospitalizations by 50 percent and eliminate deaths for people with mild to moderate disease.

“This is another exciting tool that we very well may get in our tool belt,” Marsh said. “And this might be able to augment the use of the monoclonal antibodies and people at risk.”

There is no official delivery date for this new treatment.

James Hoyer, head of the Joint Interagency Coronavirus Task Force, said shipments of those monoclonal antibodies have been delayed with seven states with low vaccination rates receiving the lion’s share.

Last week, the state expected 3,000 doses but only received 1,368. This week, the state expected to receive 1,584 doses, but as of Friday had only received 156.

The antibody treatment is about 80 percent effective, while the new oral medication is thought to be about 50 percent effective. It is more convenient for rural areas though. It is in pill form and does not require refrigeration. The dosage is two pills a day for five days, according to Marsh.

“Even though it’s a little bit less effective than the antibody treatment, it is still really good,” Marsh said. “It reduced the risk of death to zero in the 29 days, in which 775 people who were part of the clinical trial participated.”

Eighty people have died from COVID-19 since Justice’s last briefing on Wednesday. A total of 3,722 West Virginians have died since the start of the pandemic. Justice became visibly emotional when he read the age of a 30-year-old male from Wetzel County. He noted the man was younger than both of his own children.

Mental Health Support Coming To 3 W.Va. County School Systems

The coronavirus pandemic forced millions of students around the globe into remote and virtual learning. But studies now show that it has caused significant, negative impacts on students’ mental well-being.

Three county school systems in West Virginia and their education partners are receiving hundreds of thousands of federal dollars this year, and every year over the next five years to tackle the mental health needs of their K-12 students.

Fayette, Logan and Wirt counties will each receive more than $470,000 every year, totaling more than $1.4 million in each of those counties by the end of the five-year period.

Multiple partners, including the West Virginia Department of Education’s (WVDE) Office of Student Support and Well-Being, Marshall University’s Center of Excellence for Recovery, West Virginia Bureau for Behavioral Health, WVU Prevention Research Center and others, will collaborate to provide support to the designated local education partners (LEA) in Fayette, Logan and Wirt counties, according to a news release.

The money comes from a grant funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

“The funding provided by SAMHSA could not have come at a more critical time as our students, their families and educators are struggling with navigating the effects of COVID-19,” said State Superintendent of Schools Clayton Burch. “Providing concrete supports, expanding school connectedness, implementing prevention education and increasing social-emotional competence are all important protective factors that will be offered through the work of the state’s Project AWARE teams.”

The AWARE grant, which stands for Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education, is giving the WVDE $9 million to be used to support and increase wellness and resiliency in West Virginia students.

“Ultimately, we hope that these factors will help guide our students through this pandemic and help make them happier and healthier,” Burch said.

Specifically, the grant will help pay for school personnel to receive training on how to identify and respond to mental health needs, according to the WVDE.

Additionally, of that $9 million, the WVDE said $345,726 will go to the non-LEA partners, and $28,911 will be set aside by the state to administer the grant and program.

This award builds on an existing network created through a 2020 AWARE grant, which included local education agencies in Cabell, Clay and Harrison counties. Those agencies are beginning their second year of work with the grant funds.

**Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story listed Lincoln as one of the counties to benefit from the latest AWARE grant in West Virginia. This was incorrect and should have been Logan County.

Second Year Of Financial Aid Webinars Launches To Help Students, Families

Prospective college students and their families around the state can attend a new series of financial aid webinars aimed at helping them navigate the process of seeking a degree.

More than $100 million is available in financial aid annually in West Virginia, and state officials say the webinars can help students better understand what is available to them.

“We reached so many people last year through our financial aid webinars during the pandemic, so we wanted to keep it going again this year,” said Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of both the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and the West Virginia Community and Technical College System.

Tucker said during the pandemic, all of the traditionally in-person financial aid events held at high schools were canceled. She said putting them online, however, allowed them to reach more students than before.

“I encourage West Virginians to join us, ask questions, and learn about the numerous programs that make college incredibly affordable and accessible in West Virginia,” Tucker said.

Twenty financial aid webinars will be held from Sept. 13 through April 5.

They’ll cover things like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the Promise Scholarship, the West Virginia Invests Grant and several others.

View the full calendar of events here.

More information can be found at collegeforwv.com.

COVID Cases Surge Among W.Va. K-12 Students, More Schools Adopt Masking Policies

As the Delta COVID-19 variant continues to surge around the country, masking policies in schools were major points of discussion at the September West Virginia Board of Education meeting.

As of Thursday morning, there were 82 outbreak cases in West Virginia K-12 schools — that’s up by 12 from the day before. Those outbreak cases total more than 620 individual positive cases of COVID-19 among students and staff — that’s up by nearly 100 individual cases from the day before.

The state’s education system is overwhelmed, officials said.

“The delta variant has not only overwhelmed our school system, but our local health departments,” said West Virginia Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Michelle Blatt. “So to encourage more of our counties, [we] along with the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, have implemented that if you have a universal mask policy, then you do not have to do contact tracing.”

Blatt told state board of education members that the WVDE and DHHR are recommending that if schools in the state implement universal masking policies — meaning masks on at all times except in the cafeteria or outside — they will not need to do extensive contact tracing.

“That means we will not have the large number of quarantines,” Blatt told the board. “We will not have as many staff members out because we will have other protocols in place.”

Many schools are experiencing a record number of absences due to quarantines, and some schools have needed to temporarily close.

Whether to mask remains a local decision for county school districts in West Virginia.

Blatt said Wednesday that 29 counties have implemented universal masking policies, while 13 have issued a masking mandate that changes based on whether a county is orange or red on DHHR’s COVID-19 risk map.

Additionally, some counties require masks depending on the percentage of vaccinations in a school or the percentage of people who are in quarantine.

In total, there are 49 county school systems, as of Wednesday afternoon, with some type of masking policy.

“We have seen a dramatic increase in [outbreaks],” Blatt said. “Now with many more counties going to a mask mandate, we hope that numbers will decrease significantly.”

Following Blatt’s presentation, West Virginia Board of Education members had a lengthy discussion about whether to issue a statewide masking mandate and whether the state board has the power to do so.

“Our youngest children are vulnerable. They can’t get vaccinations,” said board member Debrah Sullivan. “They are the ones that are ending up now, nationally, in hospitals and dying. It just seems that we have a tsunami right now of cases, and if we could do anything to stop this flood, that we would do it … I wonder why we can’t take the decision [regarding masks] off the backs of the superintendents.”

Sullivan argued that prior to the availability of the vaccine, the state board of education did require masks of all 55 county school systems, and she argued they ought to think about doing that again. She equated masks as being no different than part of the dress code.

“It’s a piece of cloth. It’s a piece of paper,” Sullivan said. “And it protects everybody. Those who are unvaccinated, as well as those who are vaccinated.”

Another board member argued, however, it should continue to remain a local decision, because people will be more likely to comply.

West Virginia Board of Education President Miller Hall said a statewide mask mandate should be something they discuss at another meeting.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Hall said to Sullivan. “But right now, this is not a point for us to make a decision on whether today we should go back to masks or not. This is something that we have to think about. We have to discuss. Perhaps have an emergency meeting.”

Hall and other board members urged West Virginians to get the COVID-19 vaccinations. Several members called on residents to “step up” and get the shot.