This op-ed by Dr. M. Pilar Gonzalez Jimenez-Ortiz appeared in the New York Daily News. Read the full story here.
The world has been flipped upside down. As emergency rooms and inpatient hospital floors are converted into COVID-19 units and intensive care units remain full or near-full, pediatric departments around the United States are dealing with a different set of challenges. Children have generally not been severely affected, admitted to hospitals or intubated due to COVID-19, so many pediatrics practices have been deemed “non-essential” health-care activities. Families have postponed routine health-care visits due to fear of bringing their children to hospitals where there is a high incidence of COVID-19 infections and citywide recommendations to stay home and minimize travel.
This disruption of pediatric care has resulted in a 14% drop in immunization rates across New York City, as reported by the Citywide Immunization Registry.
At NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, one of the largest hospitals within New York City’s public health system, we were hit early and hard, quickly becoming the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York. After five weeks of remarkable and tireless efforts by our dedicated staff, we are in a better place today. Due to the adoption of social distancing measures by our patients, the number of emergency department visits, admissions, intubations and positive COVID tests in our population have markedly decreased.
While these improvements are a huge relief, our concern over dropping immunization rates remains. Our hospital has long been a national leader in ensuring childhood and adolescent immunizations and our achievements were recently recognized by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Bureau of Immunization. In recent weeks, we have worked diligently to promote childhood immunizations through extensive community outreach and partnerships with health plans such as MetroPlus and Healthfirst.
However, if immunization rates continue to drop, herd immunity, or the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results when a high percentage of the population is vaccinated, will be lost. This is a particular concern with measles and pertussis, infections that require vaccination rates upwards of 95% to maintain herd immunity.
It is time to recuperate the preventive care services we are so proud of and work so hard to deliver. Parents understand that immunizations are the best preventive practice. In fact, the mildest infection is the one you’ve never had. Our patients trust us and welcome vaccines for their children. We must now begin working together to create a safe environment capable of delivering immunizations and other preventive services in order to promote a healthy pediatric population.
Immunizations are essential medical interventions necessary to maintain excellent health in the community, and their value needs to be reinforced. I’m afraid that if we lose sight of these basic and necessary health maintenance measures, other common, easily preventable infections will be knocking at our door. A vaccine-preventable disease outbreak during a global pandemic would be a public health crisis adding enormous complexity to an already stressed and fragmented health-care system. Such an outbreak would have unprecedented consequences for our communities.