GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — Local healthcare leaders are looking back on how healthcare messaging has been done during the pandemic.
Dr. Raul Mendoza with Aurora Baycare says that, while hindsight is 20/20, there are things he wishes were made more clear to the public, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic.
“I wish I could say from the outside ‘masks do work, social distancing does work’, and a lot more than hand washing,” said Mendoza during a Thursday press briefing.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, federal officials actually discouraged mask wearing. At the time, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ that “Masks do not work for the general public and preventing them from getting coronavirus” and tweeted, asking Americans not to buy medical masks.
Weeks later, health officials insisted on their use.
Federal officials also touted a plan for “15 days to slow the spread” of COVID-19. Three years later, it’s clear how little we knew.
“I wish I could have conveyed the message that this was a marathon, not a sprint,” Mendoza added. “We are in year number three, and what the scientists told us then was not clearly conveyed.”
Dr. Ashok Rai with Prevea Health disagrees with the notion held among detractors that healthcare officials have “changed their minds” on guidance during the pandemic.
“As people in science, we’re used to pivoting all the time, we’re used to science evolving,” Rai said Thursday. “It’s just about making sure that people who were not used to that realized that it’s not that we’re changing our minds, it’s that the data evolved.”
Rai did admit the benefit of hindsight.
“There are a lot of things that, if we could redo, we would do better,” said Rai.
Mendoza also lamented a perceived unclearness in regards to vaccine efficacy.
“The vaccines are working fantastic for the job they were designed for,” Mendoza said. “But [I wish] we could have made sure the public knew the limitations of the vaccine.”
Breakthrough cases–cases of COVID-19 that infected already-vaccinated people–increased during the latest Omicron variant. The World Health Organization has stated need for new formulations of COVID-19 vaccine to better handle variants of the virus.
Nearly three years into the pandemic COVID-19’s Omicron variant raised transmission rates higher than they’ve ever been, although in recent days hospitalizations and infections in Wisconsin have been trending down. There were 8,085 new cases confirmed in the state on Wednesday, dropping the seven-day average to 7,958. DHS reported 24 new deaths on Wednesday, pushing the seven-day average down to 33.
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