SAN ANTONIO – It’s a question many people in San Antonio want to know — have we flattened the curve?
Dr. Bryan Alsip, University Health System’s chief medical officer and a member of the COVID-19 Health Transition Team answered this and other questions about the new coronavirus in a video provided by UHS.
“Well, the data would show that we actually have flattened the curve,” Alsip said.
Alsip said about two weeks after San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff issued the “Stay Home, Work Safe” order, San Antonio started seeing a decline in the number of new cases and in the number of patients in the hospital.
Question: “How and why do you think we’ve been successful (at flattening the curve)?”
Alsip said one of the things that helped San Antonio be successful at flattening the curve is that we had early experience with COVID-19 due to the evacuees from Wuhan and two cruise ships who were sent to quarantine at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
“It really created a necessity to help us organize around how to receive and treat and manage these patients throughout all the hospitals. It also brought together the emergency operations center staff in a way that was very meaningful,” Alsip said. “So that early experience, I think gives us a head start before we really experienced any large numbers of patients in our community.”
He also credited elected officials with communicating well with the public.
“That, I think, led to some trust. So when you have trust and they ask you to stay home and work safe, people are more likely to do so,” Alsip said.
Click on the questions below to see Dr. Alsip’s answers.
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