series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.<\/em><\/p>\nHospital officials, anticipating a surge of COVID-19 cases, urged deferring routine, nonemergency care so doctors, nurses, and other personnel could focus on pandemic patients. But a new study from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center suggests that too many, either to avoid straining medical resources or fearing infection at the hospital, may have put off emergency care for issues like heart attacks and strokes, at a cost of lives. Dhruv Kazi, director of Beth Israel\u2019s Cardiac Critical Care Unit and a Harvard Medical School faculty member, and associate director of the hospital\u2019s Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology, spoke with the Gazette about the study\u2019s findings of a 33 percent drop in heart attack patients and 58 percent drop in stroke patients at the hospital during March and April.<\/p>\n
GAZETTE: <\/strong><\/span>What did you find when you looked at hospitalizations for non-COVID conditions at Beth Israel?<\/p>\nKAZI:<\/span> <\/strong>Early on in the pandemic, it became clear to those of us who work in the intensive care unit and more broadly in cardiology that the number of patients seeking care for emergencies such as heart attacks or strokes had dropped precipitously. Patients were simply not showing up.<\/p>\nAnd, as we had conversations with colleagues across the country, we realized that this was a national phenomenon and, in fact, an international phenomenon. Patients are not seeking care for conditions that we would normally think of as emergent and potentially life-threatening. So we compared the rates of patients presenting with heart attacks and stroke during the course of the pandemic with an equivalent period of time earlier in the year, before the start of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
We used last year\u2019s data to adjust for the usual month-to-month variation you would expect over this time period. We expected to find a decline but were still surprised by the magnitude of it: a 33 percent reduction in hospitalizations for heart attacks and a 58 percent reduction in strokes. The reduction in heart attacks my co-investigators and I had seen firsthand as cardiologists, but the stroke numbers were pretty stunning.<\/p>\n