Attorney drills health officer with questions

RITZVILLE – Adams County Health Officer Dr. Alex Brzezny presented county commissioners an update on the status of COVID-19 in the county and elsewhere at their Mar. 10 meeting.

Following the presentation, Adams County Prosecuting Attorney Randy Flyckt had several questions for Brzezny.

“You said this has never been studied before, because this is a brand new virus and we've never been through this before,” Flyckt said.

“We are learning from the prior pandemics. But we've never deployed vaccine on this scale to control a global pandemic,” Brzezny answered.

Flyckt next asked how many variants the medical community is aware of.

Brzezny said the medical community was focused on "variants of concern," meaning variants which become dominant and lead to a change of behavior of a given variant.

"Viruses change and mutate all the time. Therefore, there is thousands of changes on the viruses over a span of 5-10 years that will not be of concern, because they will not increase the infectiousness and they will not lead to more death," Brzezny said "It becomes of concern only if it changes the human health. That's why the vaccines are gearing towards the changes that have led to potential greater risk for the humans."

Flyckt asked if that spelled a risk for developing a vaccine that would no longer be effective in the future.

Brzezny responded the antibiotic penicillin was developed just prior to World War II, and within five years bacteria were becoming resistant to penicillin.

"And so what did we do as humans? We developed amoxicillin, a better antibiotic, and after that, broad spectrum. So we've responded as humans when the bacteria adapted. This is going to be a perpetual battle between the human and a virus, including influenza, including covid. It is within our scientific capacity to continue to respond in kind to the virus changes.”

Flyckt said moving forward, it seems like there is no end in sight.

"Are we going to be living with this kind of a status quo, with these kind of restrictions for the next five, ten years or generations to come?” he asked.

Brzezny said vaccines developed continue to be at least partially effective for the variants.

"The vaccine protects you from getting the disease, and that is only one part of the vaccine. You could still get Covid, but what we are interested in is, is the vaccine capable of protecting you from getting hospitalized or dying or becoming severely ill. And that function of the vaccine is much better preserved," Brzezny said. "Covid will never go away. It is going to be perpetually and eternally present."

Brzezny went on to say Israel has vaccinated large proportions of their populations and have lockdowns still in place so people don't travel in and out of Israel.

"They have seen dramatic decrease in the activity of the Covid virus in the state of Israel. Hospitalizations dramatically down," Brzezny said. "Deaths almost nonexistent among the elderly anymore. So you have seen that the vaccine is already playing out."

Brzezny said he thought the need for significant lockdowns and restrictions will not be permanent, but there will be an occasional need for them.

Brzezny said another example was a dramatic decline in the death rate in nursing homes in the United States, attributing the decline to both the decline of the disease itself as well as vaccinations taking place in nursing homes.

"The vaccination rate in nursing homes is very high. Studies are on the way to see how much of that is the vaccine that's caused that decline," Brzezny said. "But let me just say there is no guarantee. There will be a variant here and there.”

Brzezny next explained by way of example how the great Russian Influenza Pandemic of 1889-1891 resulted in over a million deaths recorded.

"They thought it was influenza. But later studies demonstrated that this probably was human corona virus. Not influenza," Brzezny said. "So we actually seem to have a historical precedence for something that now has become a cold virus. Over a period of 100 years, we have realized that this was most likely a corona virus pandemic that spread throughout the whole world. When they trace back the genetics of the virus and it's changes, it seemingly became a cold virus right before World War II. And then we have this corona virus, Covid-19, which doesn't yet give us cold because the immune system fully doesn't know it yet. The vaccines are familiarizing your immune system with it, while preventing the deaths that otherwise would have been occurring if this is allowed to just burn through uncontrollably."

Flyckt next asked why, despite having re-occurring influenza every year for the past 100 years, incidents of influenza have been nearly nonexistent during this pandemic.

Brzezny said while he didn't know the answer, he had read articles on the issue by epidemiologists studying it.

"How I'm interpreting it is that these interventions we have embarked upon; mitigation measures, in general, that we have been doing against Covid are more effective against influenza than they are against Covid. The masking, distancing, decreasing size of our school populations, decreasing work places, less people getting together, less people traveling across the globe. But there is other thinking, that the corona virus has some capacity to push the other viruses out of the picture. It basically competes with the influenza for your nose and throat and your airway, and has been much more effective at doing that, so when your body already has the corona virus, influenza doesn't have a chance with covid.”

When Flyckt asked Brzezny if he thought the corona virus would eventually supercede influenza and colds, Brzezny said he thought they would coexist.

"Can covid become the only virus here? No, I think we are within 10 to 15 years of another pandemic. And we will keep seeing pandemics as humanity because of how many of us there are and how much we travel across the globe and how much we interact with animal world," Brzezny said. "As homo sapiens, we will fight that because we have the capacity to fight back. We couldn't fight back in 1918. The only thing they had is the mitigation. They didn't have treatments, they didn't have antibodies, and they certainly didn't develop vaccines.”

County Commissioner Chairman Dan Blankenship asked what Brzezny recommended regarding opening up services in the courthouse more.

Brzezny said the decision couldn't come from health officers, but by the governor and the state Department of Health.

"Health officers are on the enforcement end of it," Brzezny said. "So you should express that concern to your representatives and with the governor's office, because that is the person whose been the key on many issues, including on vaccination places, priorities, reopening phases and what to do with things like reopening government and services.”

Blankenship expressed concern with the lack of guidance on government service buildings.

"It's frustrating when you contact the governor's office or whoever and they say well just go look at this document, and it's not clear at all,” Blankenship said.

Brzezny told him the Department of Labor and Industries was predominantly the agency to do the enforcing, so they should be providing guidance.

"They are the ones looking at whether your employees are protected or whether you're putting your employees in danger, with things that you are doing, by interacting with the public," Brzezny said. "You want to definitely be looking out for your employees. And vaccinating your employees is one of the best ways how to show that you had that on your mind.”

Blankenship said while healthcare workers are deemed essential workers, government public services employees are not.

"So you've got people that are primarily between the ages of 25-45 trying to serve the public, and they're not going to be able to be vaccinated for who knows how long," Blankenship said. "And it puts that whole government service thing at jeopardy, in that it could be six months before I could reopen those doors."

Brzezny said looking at the bigger picture, the first order was to protect the nursing homes.

"Then you see that nobody is going to be happy, because there is not enough vaccine," Brzezny said. "And we need that vaccine as much in the governmental services as we need them in the hospitals. When you start that rollout, however, it's got to start somewhere and you go where your losses were the biggest."

Commissioner Jay Weise said guidance out there now indicates a courthouse can be opened up in the same way a business is open.

"You'd have your protective screens, masks when you have contact, and reduce the number that's coming in," Weise said. "It does allow us to do that.”

Brzezny said he could see being open on staggered dates part of future mitigations as well as more reliance on technology to avoid in-person contact.

“That's an economic opportunity for a lot of businesses that can come out to serve those needs for your remote meetings and so on," Brzezny said. "So we may have lost some jobs in one place that we may be regaining under IT."