Gee, what happened to all the heart attacks during that lockdown? People were having them at home.

[Mark Crispin Miller]

More unworthy victims of the COVID-19 crisis---not of that disease, but of the panic systematically incited over it.

MCM

Denver doctors may have found the answer to a pandemic mystery: What happened to all the heart attacks?

A new study looks at the number of cardiac arrest deaths occurring at home in the time of coronavirus, comparing the stay-at-home period to prior months

https://coloradosun.com/2020/08/17/denver-coronavirus-deaths-heart-attack/

PUBLISHED ONAUG 17, 2020 12:00PM MDTCORONAVIRUSPRIMARY CATEGORY IN WHICH BLOG POST IS PUBLISHED

John Ingold@johningold

The Colorado Sun — johni...@coloradosun.com

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When the new coronavirus first swept through Colorado earlier this year, baffling doctors with its myriad of symptoms and methods of spread, Dr. Brian Stauffer, the head of cardiology at Denver Health, soon began to notice a different kind of pandemic mystery.

People, it seemed, had stopped having heart attacks.

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At Denver Health and other large hospitals across the metro area, the number of people showing up with cardiac emergencies dropped significantly as the state imposed increasingly strict measures encouraging people to stay at home to slow the virus’ spread. And this was not unique to Colorado — hospitals across the country and in Europe documented the same phenomenon. Had stay-at-home orders somehow also slowed heart attacks or were people in need of medical help simply not seeking it for fear of COVID-19?

A new study from Stauffer and several Denver Health colleagues offers the first clue to the answer in Colorado. Looking at data on ambulance calls in Denver, they found that, while overall calls for service went down during the stay-at-home period, the number of people dying from cardiac arrests at home shot up.

Stauffer’s team found that cardiac arrests at home in Denver more than doubled in the two weeks after the statewide stay-at-home order was issued compared with historical averages. Even compared with more recent data, the weekly average of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests jumped to 46 during those two weeks, versus 26 or 27 in the three months prior.

Click on the link for the rest.