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Munson Healthcare Sees Increase in Covid Patients for the New Year

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The increase in Covid-19 cases and the strain on hospitals was a big topic of discussion from Munson Healthcare in their weekly update on Tuesday.

Right now, Northern Michigan’s case numbers are lower than the state average, but regionally, high case counts are holding steady.

“The length of stay for a Covid-positive patient does tend to be much longer, certainly, but those who are unvaccinated tend to have a much more significant course–they have, generally speaking, a more serious illness than those hospitalized who are vaccinated,” said Munson Healthcare Chief Medical Officer Christine Nefcy.

Grand Traverse County Health Officer Wendy Hirschenberger says right now their case numbers are at their highest ever.

“The numbers have been doubling every two weeks since the beginning of January, so we’ve kind of quadrupled where we were at the end of December, right now,” said Hirschenberger. “Since the beginning of the year, we’ve had over 3,000 cases just in Grand Traverse County.”

In order to help stop the spread, individuals must prioritize protecting themselves, as well as protecting health care capacity.

“Our hospital systems and EMS systems were already strained and so we’re starting from a difficult place and it requires everyone to do what they can to reduce community spread,” said Benzie-Leelanau District Health Department Health Officer Lisa Peacock.

Both state and local health departments also said they’re stopping contact tracing–which frees up staff in other ways.

“We’re making some transitions to our dedicated information lines, so we really want to make those public health professionals who may not be doing individual cold calls for every positive case, available to those who would like to reach out to us,” said Peacock. “For the Health Department of Northwest Michigan, we included the 1-800 phone number that people can call and then for Benzie-Leelanau this week, we included our hotline email.”

Medical Director Jennifer Morse also brought up that many areas in Northern Michigan are still under 50% for having initiated vaccinations.

“We just have areas that continue to have pretty low initiation rates, but again, we are continuing to see people getting vaccinated, which is good,” said Morse.

Many areas in Northern Michigan are still under a 50% vaccination rate.

Munson currently has 88 patients hospitalized–31 of those are vaccinated, 5 boosted and 57 did not receive the vaccine.

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