MIDLAND, Texas — It has been a long time coming. Back on March 18, 2020, Midland Memorial Hospital reported its first COVID-19 hospitalization. From there, the numbers continued to rise.
Fast forward to March 2022, and those numbers officially hit zero at MMH. Odessa Regional Medical Center also reported zero COVID-19 hospitalizations, while Medical Center Hospital currently sits at four.
"It was back in March of 2020, so it’s been a long time, and the staff has been very diligent and supportive," Val Sparks, infection preventionist at Midland Memorial Hospital said. "Right now, we are breathing a little sigh of relief."
Sparks credits the downturn in the number of hospitalizations to a couple of things: vaccines and natural immunity.
"I think those that are vaccinated, of course, are helping the situation, and we had a lot of people who had either Delta, or Omicron, or both and they have some natural immunity," Sparks said. "So once you’ve had it, and it’s within the first three months or so after having it, you do have your natural immunities."
All of this providing some much-needed relief to hospitals that have been working hard and bursting at the seams at times with patients, but Sparks knows that MMH will stay vigilant in case COVID-19 decides to rear its ugly head once again.
"We kind of tend to think that COVID may be cyclical, kind of like the flu, so that’s kind of the way we are preparing going forward is to treat it as an endemic infectious disease that we will see in the future again," Sparks said.
It took two years to come back down to zero. Now, Sparks is hoping that hospitalization numbers will stay close to zero moving forward.
"I do expect to see, you know, one or two pop in and out," Sparks said. "Our death count for March is way down, and hopefully we can keep it maybe at zero for April. That’d be great."