Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare, one of the Southeast’s premier medical providers, has mandated coronavirus vaccinations for all of its more than 24,000 employees as the highly contagious delta variant fuels a surge in new COVID-19 infections.
Emory’s move follows a similar one last week by Piedmont Healthcare, but it sets a marker for other hospital systems — and, possibly, non-health care employers — to take more aggressive steps to slow the virus’ spread, experts said Wednesday.
At the same time, though, it comes amid a torrent of misinformation and confusion about the vaccine and the pandemic itself. Georgia’s seven-day rolling average of newly reported COVID-19 cases has almost quadrupled in the past two weeks. But experts say the vast majority of those cases, especially ones severe enough to cause hospitalization or death, are among unvaccinated people and that widespread inoculation remains the best hope of containing the virus.
Just 40% of Georgians are fully vaccinated, compared to 50% nationwide.
Emory Healthcare had been reluctant to order the shots. Like other large health care providers, it hoped a majority of employees would voluntarily take them. In fact, more than two-thirds did. But the recent surge in new cases, combined with Georgia’s low vaccination rate, compelled officials at Emory to act more quickly.
“It is the right thing to do from a public health perspective,” several top executives at Emory wrote in a memo circulated among employees. “Not only does this create a safe environment for our patients but for each of us.”
Emory said it wants all employees to be vaccinated by Oct. 1.
“As this significant spike in infections becomes more serious, we have a commitment to provide a safe environment both for our patients and our care teams,” an Emory spokeswoman wrote in a prepared statement.
It remains unclear how long the latest outbreak might continue and whether it will be as devastating as earlier waves of the pandemic. But assessing the recent data was complicated this week by a faulty report from the state Department of Public Health, which seemed to show an alarming single-day increase in new infections that rivaled the worst days of last winter.
A data problem with the state’s electronic laboratory reporting system combined four days of positive diagnoses into one day, spokeswoman Nancy Nydam said in a statement. That made it appear that the number of new cases skyrocketed from 1,893 on Monday to 6,480 on Tuesday, when that actually reflected the increase since Friday.
The mistake set off alarms among some of the state’s top public health experts, including Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive dean at Emory School of Medicine.
“I am really worried. ... They just added 6,480 new case in ONE DAY!” del Rio wrote on Twitter. “That is a case increase not seen since the winter surge.”
The computer glitch closely followed recent headlines about unclear advice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over whether and where to wear face masks and the danger of so-called “breakthrough” infections among the vaccinated. Some vaccine skeptics seized on the reporting about breakthrough cases to suggest the vaccine is not effective.
“It’s stressful for me, the fact that we’ve got a vaccine and that there’s so much misinformation,’' said Russ Story, chairman of the Coffee County Hospital Authority, which oversees a 100-bed rural hospital in south Georgia. “It’s frustrating because a lot of these sicknesses we have now and probably going forward could have been eliminated with the vaccine.”
Credit: Ben Gray / Ben@BenGray.com
Credit: Ben Gray / Ben@BenGray.com
“There should be a line of people waiting to get the shot about a half a mile long at our hospital,” he said. Instead, patients are packing the emergency room of Coffee Regional Medical Center in Douglas. On Wednesday, the hospital had more than 30 coronavirus patients. About a month ago, it had just two.
“The staff, for lack of a better word, are quite stressed,” Story said.
With vaccination rates increasing very slowly, the virus has taken on a new life across the state.
On July 1, Georgia’s seven-day rolling average of newly reported, confirmed and probable COVID-19 infections was 437. Two weeks ago, the average was 1,251. On Wednesday, it was 4,164.
New hospitalizations usually follow new infections by a few days, and those are rising too. COVID-19 hospitalizations stood at 2,767 on Wednesday. That’s up from 949 two weeks earlier and from 445 on July 1.
Deaths have not yet soared, but they usually lag behind initial case reports by several weeks.
“What we tend to see is ... deaths follow about three to five weeks later, and so we’ll see that trend start to climb,” Amber Schmidtke, a public health expert who studies Georgia’s pandemic data, said in an interview. “I don’t want to say that I’m hoping that’s going to happen—I certainly do not—but I’m expecting that it’s going to happen in the next couple weeks or so.”
Areas where cases are increasing tend to have low vaccination rates, Schmidtke said. “But no part of the state is safe right now.”
The Savannah area, for instance, is seeing coronavirus-related hospitalizations that match the peaks of last summer and winter.
“And it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down,” Schmidtke said. “So we’re really kind of in uncharted territory. ... Georgia is on fire again.”
With that background, she said, Emory’s step was admirable.
“I think that it will help, especially if we start to see other organizations do this to, to really drive vaccination rates up,” she said.
Emory said it had originally planned on requiring employees to take the vaccine once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved the drugs. But officials “reconsidered” after a significant rise in hospital admissions, the Emory spokeswoman said.
Recent news reports indicate that, within the next month, the FDA expects to fully approve one of the three vaccines now authorized on an emergency basis.
Even with only emergency authorization, the Emory spokeswoman said, each of the vaccines “have demonstrated a remarkable safety record after hundreds of millions of administrations given. We feel our decision to require COVID vaccinations for all our team members is the right and best decision from a public health perspective and our strongest defense against the virus.”
