Last week, Hamilton County experienced a spike in COVID-19 cases that resulted in 274 new cases reported by the Indiana State Department of Health.
A mandatory mask mandate issued by Governor Holcomb began on Monday and many local health officials are optimistic the mandate will help curb additional new cases.
Doctor Eric Marcotte, Chief Medical Officer at Riverview Health, supports Holcomb’s mandate and says wearing a mask helps protect others.
Marcotte
“I’m glad to see Governor Holcomb mandate masks,” Marcotte said. “Doctors and hospitals have known for a hundred years that wearing masks protect others. It is never optional for a surgeon to wear a mask during surgery. We know how risky that would be for the patient. Most physicians have no doubt that masks prevent the spread of germs. I’m glad that our state politicians wisely listened to the experts.”
Marcotte believes much of Indiana’s increased case counts in the last six weeks is likely due to excellent testing capacity.
“Thanks to foresight and good communication between Indiana government and healthcare, we are able to test at a much higher rate than many states,” Marcotte said. “The goal is to decrease the ‘test positivity rate’ to under 7 percent. Test positivity means how many of all the tests we do show that someone has COVID-19. Scientists think that the higher this number is, the more people with an infection are being missed. Indiana has been able to bring the positivity rate down, unlike many states in the south … Florida, the Carolinas and Arizona are experiencing a very different sort of surge.”
Although the state and county are experiencing spikes in number of cases, hospitalizations are down.
Graphic provided by Indiana State Department of Health
“It seems most likely that a combination of wise decisions is giving Indiana a temporary lull in our hospitalization rate,” Marcotte said. “The badly hit states with high test positivity rates also have very high hospitalization and intensive care rates. They are also seeing substantial death rates, unfortunately. We know several things now that we didn’t in March that are big help to Indiana in our current stage.”
According to Marcotte, healthcare officials have a better understanding of:
- How to better test and quarantine infected people,
- How to better protect vulnerable seniors in nursing homes and assisted living facilities,
- How to better predict which patients are likely to do badly with COVID-19; and,
- How to treat someone when they are hospitalized so they can go home much sooner.
“With universal masking, I expect our infection rate to drop rapidly,” Marcotte said. “That is also our best hope that we will not have a Florida- or Arizona-like situation develop here in the Hoosier state.”