BROWNSVILLE — The beginning of 2021 looked very promising in the United States, especially for medical providers who described the arrival of the vaccines as “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
As the summer kicked in, doctors soon realized COVID-19 was not over yet and can be attributed in part to the one thing that continues to put thousands in danger: the infodemic.
An infodemic, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is a blend of “information” and “epidemic” that typically refers to a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about something, such as a disease. As facts, rumors, and fears mix and disperse, it becomes difficult to learn essential information about an issue.
“Social media is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It’s a double-edged sword. You have to know which information is the right information to take,” Dr. Jamil Madi, who has been working in hospitals in Brownsville and Harlingen throughout the pandemic, said.
“If you open Google and you search anything of your liking, whatever your heart desires you’ll find. So, if your heart desires that this is fake, you will find fake news for it. If you believe in it, you will find that it is the truth. So you have to go where the science is. When the large body of scientists and researchers tell you something — I’m telling you a large body, the majority. — when they tell you that this is the way to go and everyone needs to be vaccinated, that you should continue taking precautions and the virus is not behind us yet, you should listen to them.”
Madi describes the past year and a half as traumatizing to say the least with the several COVID-19 waves the world has experienced. By the end of February of this year, as more vaccines started to become available, Madi remembers thinking how it felt to be getting out of the “dark and long tunnel” that COVID-19 was. He said he started to see improvements in the hospital, the number of COVID patients declining drastically and just a few sporadic admissions due to COVID-19 every now and then, but it was controllable.
Then, summer 2021 hit and hospitals started to fill up with COVID-19 patients again. But this time it is different due to the severity of COVID-19 complications for those who were “safe” during the past waves. Madi said with the delta variant it is different than other waves because the age group of the patients coming in is much younger and patients are just as sick as those who were described as “high risk” in the past. Patients in their 20s, 30s and 40s are now being treated in the ICU with the majority of them being unvaccinated.
“As June came in and when July knocked on our doors, we started to see a slow and steady increase in the number of hospitalizations of COVID patients,” he said.
“This is the most contagious respiratory virus that we’ve seen so far. It is far more contagious than the initial COVID virus, the alpha virus. In that sense, with the virus being extremely contagious, it means that it is carried by vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The difference is that vaccinated people will probably carry the virus without having any symptoms. …
“The number two thing that we noticed is the majority of the patients coming to the hospitals are unvaccinated. One in every 30 to 35 patients is either partially or completely vaccinated. On top of that, the ones who are vaccinated, who do come into the hospital tend to have a milder disease of the virus, than the ones who are not vaccinated. We rarely have any vaccinated patients who end up in the ICU.”
Eder Hernandez, doctor of medical science and board certified by the National Commission of Physician Assistants, has been on the front lines of COVID testing in Brownsville since March of last year. Hernandez ran the first mass testing site in the city for months before closing it due to the decrease in demand with the vaccines becoming more available. This week, due to the increasing number of requests he has received to get tested, he has opened the drive-thru testing again.
“Our biggest worry is that we still have a large amount of people in the population here that are unvaccinated. And they have very high-risk factors, which is obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. Those are all precursors for high risk complications from the virus,” he said.
“The first and most important step in mitigating this disease is getting as many people as we can vaccinated. The second thing is providing adequate testing and contact tracing. We need to know who is positive and we need to know who that person has exposed.”
When it comes to breakthrough infections, Hernandez said the vast majority of those testing positive are unvaccinated. He said more than 80 percent of patients testing positive are unvaccinated, making them more at risk to develop severe illness.
“The difference is the severity of the disease. The severity for the disease for those vaccinated tend to be very mild and moderate, while the severity for unvaccinated are from moderate to severe,” he said.
“This virus, because this variant produces more viruses, people get sicker, they have more issues and more complications. There’s new data that states that if you’re vaccinated you can still spread the virus. So, even vaccinated people need to wear their masks until we get the variants under control.”
Across the border in Matamoros, Dr. Ilse Mandujano has shared how exhaustive it has been to be a medical professional during this pandemic throughout her social media channels. With more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, she, just like every other doctor, continues to emphasize the importance of getting the vaccine and is especially worried about pregnant women.
In a recent post, Mandujano posted a blurry photo of a patient who was in the ICU due to COVID-19. A pregnant woman in her early 20s who decided to not get the vaccine, she is one of the four pregnant women Mandujano has cared for in the ICU in just one weekend. The other three died of COVID-19 complications and they all have one thing in common: they were unvaccinated.
“When COVID-19 got here it changed everything. She didn’t want to get the vaccinate because she didn’t want to risk the baby with a new vaccine,” she wrote in Spanish. “I’m sure that she thought this was the best choice and without knowing, she did what she thought was best. Now, intubated, and with a very bad medical prognosis, the journey of the doctors and the nursing staff begins to do whatever we can, whatever is humanly possible.”
For Mandujano, the hardest part is talking to the families. Seeing the parents and husband cry desperately and ask how this can be possible. Without answers, all she can do is tell them she’ll do whatever she can to help their daughter make it out alive.
“These are times when I never know what to say, or what face to make. It creates an awkward silence that makes me want to run away,” she said. “… I can’t grab their hands or hug them and I try hard not to cry so that I can continue working because my day doesn’t end there. And I don’t know, sometimes I feel that it is necessary for me to talk about all of this. I can’t wait for all of this to end.”
