By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Mosaic Life Care has seen its COVID-19 hospitalizations stabilize.
Whether those numbers stay there is uncertain.
Mosaic Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Davin Turner, notes Mosaic has been taking care of around 50 patients the last few weeks.
“We hope that this plateau will start to show a decline, however what we witnessed in south Missouri is, initially they shot up, they plateaued, and then after several weeks, they went up again,” Turner tells reporters during a news conference at the St. Joseph hospital. “However, there is some optimism in that area that maybe that has reached a plateau.”
Southern Missouri has seen such a rash of COVID-19 patients who contracted the Delta variant it has swamped hospitals in that region of the state.
Mosaic reports 45 COVID-19 patients in its system as of Monday morning, with 42 being treated in St. Joseph, one in Maryville, and two in Albany.
Buchanan County has a low vaccination rate of around 20%. To try to boost that rate and entice more residents to get vaccinated, Mosaic will host a vaccination clinic on the Missouri Western State University campus during the Kansas City Chiefs Training Camp in St. Joseph. It will be held between 11:30am and 2pm at the Looney Complex, 4525 Downs Drive, on the Missouri Western campus in St. Joseph, Thursday, August 12th.
Turner says a couple of recent vaccination events have attracted area residents.
“We are optimistic,” Turner says. “I think many of you know when we started to see this recent surge, we did open our vaccination center up. The first day we had around 140ish show up. We just did second shots and this past week over 300 people showed up.”
If you want to get the vaccination during the Chiefs Training Camp, you must make an appointment in advance. Those getting shots next week will get a chance to interact with Chiefs players. Defensive Tackle Chris Jones and receivers Byron Pringle and Demarcus Robinson will be on hand for the vaccination clinic at the Looney Complex and will interact with those receiving vaccinations.
Now, no autograph hounds need register. Those getting the shot can bring only one person with them.
To make an appointment, click here for the Mosaic Life Care website.
Turner worries about the misinformation being spread on social media about the coronavirus vaccine. He warns area residents not to it.
“No vaccine’s perfect, but what we are seeing even though we are seeing some breakthrough cases; here locally it’s around one percent, nationally it’s around two percent of those that have been vaccinated still contract COVID. They don’t progress to requiring ICU care,” Turner says. “They do not go on to die.”
Turner says vaccination also improves a patient’s chance of recovery if they do contract COVID.
“If you get COVID and you’re not vaccinated and you progress to severe illness and if you end up in our ICU on ventilator you have a 70% chance of not surviving.”