The bright and colorful lobby at Children’s Hospital of Michigan — usually packed with youngsters playing on a giant interactive video screen with virtual fireworks and popping balloons — remains quiet these days.
The hallways of the Detroit hospital are emptier too. Most of Dr. Kevin Dazy’s young patients now come to him by video screen, part of telemedicine efforts to keep non-COVID-19 patients out of hospitals and shift them onto telehealth instead.
“It’s this surreal sense of slowness here,” the pediatrician said.
As COVID-19 continues to churn through southeast Michigan and elsewhere, wary parents are avoiding health care settings. Nationwide, emergency room visits have dropped significantly amid the pandemic, while visits to pediatricians are down 70 percent to 80 percent, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Parents were scared, and they were told to stay home” by public health recommendations and shelter-in-place orders, said Dr. Sara Goza, a pediatrician in Fayetteville, Georgia, and president of the pediatrics group.
“They’re confused.”
In Michigan, vaccines have declined in the past two months, while kids are missing critical assessments by doctors who listen to hearts and lungs for wheezing and murmurs, peer into eyes for signs of anemia, palpate abdomens to check for masses, and order up blood and urine tests to check for signs of otherwise-hidden disease.
“It’s too quiet,” said Dr. Dr. Rudolph Valentini, a pediatric kidney specialist at Children’s Hospital and chief medical officer of the Detroit Medical Center.
Children’s is staffed by pediatric specialists — the kinds who treat youngsters with cancers, lupus, kidney diseases, and other life-threatening conditions that often are flagged during well-child visits. But while chemotherapy and blood transfusions continue for youngsters that were diagnosed with life-threatening conditions before COVID-19 bore down in Michigan, there have been few new patients.
That worries Valentini and others that serious diseases are going undetected.
“Maybe you can go a month without being seen, but two months or three months is too long,” Valentini said.
A vaccine slump
He and others worry about a slump in vaccinations, too, especially among infants and toddlers.
Immunizations (excluding flu vaccines) have dropped 15.3 percent among children 24 months and younger through April 18 this year compared to the same time last year, according to Lynn Sutfin, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
Among those are vaccines for potentially deadly pertussis, or whooping cough, and particularly contagious measles, which broke out nationally last year and included 46 cases in Michigan.
Social distancing may curb some spread of infections now, but warmer weather and social reconnections may give vaccine-preventable diseases a new foothold, said Terri Adams, the manager of the MDHHS’s immunization division.
So Adams’ office has distributed new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for providers whose young patients fall behind on vaccines. But she’s also fighting economics: Some providers — faced with dried up patient loads and frightened staff — have closed up shop temporarily.
An initial outbreak of something like measles “spreads like wildfire,” she said. “These kids are vulnerable. They have no protection.”