Last Thursday, after Rosalind Palmer Ono finished eating lunch — sausage, crackers and 7 Up — she went upstairs to do some ironing and started feeling gas pains.
She took a Gas-X and an aspirin, but the pain got worse. Her husband insisted on calling the advice nurse, who told them to call 911 and go to the hospital because people often confuse indigestion with symptoms of a heart attack. But Rosalind didn’t want to go.
“I said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to go down there where the coronavirus is. I don’t want to go down there where all the other people are,’ ” Palmer Ono recalled. “I said, ‘All I have is gas, let’s not bother.’ ”
She did go, but a new data analysis of Kaiser Permanente’s 4.4 million patients in Northern California shows that Palmer Ono is far from alone in her reluctance to go to the emergency room.
Since the first COVID-19 death was reported in early March, the number of weekly hospital admissions for heart attacks dropped 50%.
“There is no intervention that we know of that can reduce heart attack rates by 50%,” said cardiologist Matt Solomon, who conducted the study released Tuesday using Kaiser’s extensive electronic medical record system.
If anything, heart attack rates tend to go up in times of societal stress, he said, as they have after earthquakes or terrorist attacks.
During the shelter-at-home orders, patients over 65 and those with a history of heart disease were the least likely to come in, the Kaiser data showed.
“These patients were repeatedly messaged that they were higher risk if they did contract COVID-19, and we worry that they stayed at home and suffered their heart attacks without getting any care,” Solomon said.