By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, May 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) — U.S. emergency rooms are seeing about half as many heart attack patients as usual — and researchers suspect the new coronavirus is the reason why.
It’s not that fewer people are having heart attacks, doctors say. Rather, it’s fear of getting COVID-19 keeping people from hospitals.
And the consequences can be deadly.
“I’m certainly not convinced that the true rate of heart attacks going down explains even a large part of this finding,” said lead researcher Dr. Matthew Solomon, a cardiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif.
“We definitely think it has something to do with the public’s response and fear about coming to the hospital and getting infected,” he said.
Solomon noted that after other major events, such as 9/11 and earthquakes, the rate of heart attacks went up.
“We know there’s a lot of public anxiety and stress and fear, and those things themselves could potentially be causing a higher rate of heart attack,” Solomon said.
“There are also a lot of reports that the emergency medical services are finding higher rates of death at home, and we worry that a good portion of those could be patients having heart attacks and strokes who did not seek care,” he added.
For the study, Solomon and his colleagues used data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California, a health care plan that includes more than 4.4 million patients. They compared the weekly rates of ER treatment for heart attacks before and after March 4, the date of the first death from COVID-19 in northern California.
Looking at records from Jan. 1 through April 14, they found that the weekly rate of hospitalization for heart attacks dropped 48% during the coronavirus period.
Moreover, fewer people with preexisting heart disease or prior heart attack went to the emergency room during the COVID weeks of March 4 through April 14, compared to the pre-COVID time frame, the researchers found.
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