GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Dr. Brad Burmeister, an emergency physician with Bellin Health, tells FOX 11 the current trajectory of the virus in our area is unfavorable.
“A week or two ago, we seemed to be down, doing a down slide, we knew that the positivity rates was creeping up a little bit, which was something we had to watch closely and it ends up being that is seems that positivity rate is translating into more cases as sort of a built up of the number of cases in our community, which we anticipate will lead to more hospitalizations and unfortunately more people dying, so our trend does not look good right now, despite our best efforts.”
The silver lining for this year, he says that compared to last year, at least there are some people who are vaccinated.
Burmeister said about 1 in 3 adults in Wisconsin did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine and unvaccinated represent the majority of people currently hospitalized and the majority of COVID-19 deaths.
Bellin Health started vaccinating children ages 5-11 for the past week. And for parents who are hesitant to get their children vaccinated, Dr. Burmeister says he understands their concerns…
“I know that people realize that kids seem to be impacted much less by COVID-19. At the same time, since September of this year, we’ve seen a growing number of cases in the pediatric population that wasn’t previously eligible for vaccination and they really became the largest age group transmitting COVID throughout our community and over the same period of time, we’ve seen a growing number of visits to the emergency department with kids and kids can be seriously impacted by COVID-19. There’s a syndrome called MISC, which is relatively rare, that can make kids really, really sick and in Wisconsin, we’ve had hundreds of kids who were hospitalized. Though in Wisconsin, we haven’t experienced any pediatric deaths in that really young age group, there’s still a significant risk and we do see pediatric deaths across the country.”
Since last week, Bellin Heath has administered hundreds of COVID-19 shots to kids ages 5-11.
“We’ve had a really robust response. Our number of kids vaccinated is in the hundreds and we are continuing to move forward. I think we’re very happy with the update in vaccinations that we’ve had in just the few days that it’s been available,” he said. “I think like a lot of things, the kids seem to do better than the adults. We have not actually had any serious side effects with over 100,000 vaccines we have given at Bellin Health and the kids seem to be tolerating it just as well overall as the adults have.”
Some have questioned the vaccine’s effectiveness with a number of breakthrough cases happening among the vaccinated.
Dr. Burmeister explains, “There’s probably a couple different reasons for that. First, the prevalence of disease is very high in the community. The vaccine is highly effective, but it is not a perfect vaccine at this point. It doesn’t prevent all cases, so with the high prevalence of disease and you’re constantly exposed to the virus, the likelihood at some point it doesn’t work for you is higher and that’s sort of the concept on herd immunity where we all together as a community need to have that vaccination and that immunity to help drive the virus down and at this point, particularly in the setting of the Delta variant, which has really challenged our trajectory at this point in the pandemic so far, it just makes it really hard for us to get to that point with enough people vaccinated.”
As far as gathering for Thanksgiving, Dr. Burmeister says there’s no situation where there is no risk, but there are certain situations which can be really high risk. People should mitigate the risk by limiting the number of people gathering, keeping distance, get vaccinated, wearing a mask if in close quarters, testing if you need and if you’re sick, stay home.
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