UPMC officials say small Mother's Day visits OK as they push Pennsylvania to reopen

UPMC’s top emergency medicine expert said Thursday that people can go out and “safely” partake in small Mother’s Day visits, maintaining his suggestion is not in conflict with the stay-at-home order that will remain in effect for Allegheny and 42 other counties this weekend.

“I think having a visit with your mother in a small group with appropriate distancing and all the usual hygiene precautions makes sense,” Dr. Don Yealy, UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine, said at a briefing on coronavirus prevention. “With a few exceptions, you can go out and share some of that special time if you’re careful. You can do that this weekend, and you can do it going forward.”

Yealy said the primary goal of “flattening the curve” — preventing a surge of patients from overwhelming hospitals — has been achieved in Western Pennsylvania.

“We expect that approximately the same number of people will get infected whether we flatten the curve or not,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

During her daily press briefing Thursday, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine said residents of counties in the red phase of the state’s tiered reopening plan should hold virtual visits with their mothers on Mother’s Day.

“The safest thing that you can do for yourself, the safest thing that you can do for your mother and your family and your community is to do that visit virtually,” she said.

She said people in yellow-phase counties could do in-person visits if that visit is to a private home, not a nursing home or personal care home.

A spokesman for the Department of Health acknowledged that keeping away from family is difficult but reiterated Levine’s encouragement of virtual visits.

“I’m not sure if Dr. Yealy may have misspoke, but for the counties that are in the yellow phase, that would be permitted,” Nate Wardle wrote in an email. “For counties in the red phase, this would violate the stay-at-home order.”

Yealy said he doesn’t see a Mother’s Day visit as flouting the state’s stay-at-home order, as he is not recommending a large group get-together, which he said “is what the governor’s orders speak to.”

Pittsburgh-based Dr. Amesh Adalja, a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, suggested a possible uptick in new cases because of Yealy’s suggestion does not put public health at a greater risk.

“The metric isn’t positive test results,” he said, noting that whether an area’s health care infrastructure can handle new cases is what officials are tracking. The Southwest region, he said, can.

Yealy noted that high percentage of covid-19 deaths are in long-term care facilities, and the median age of covid-19 deaths in Pennsylvania is 84 while the average life expectancy in the United States is 78.5.

“Nobody wants to think about our parents, grandparents or other respected elders dying before their time,” he said, touting precautions put in place at UPMC senior facilities that he said have resulted in no cases at any of those facilities.

Dr. David Nace, chief medical officer of UPMC’s senior facilities, highlighted the example of instituting a lower threshold for what constitutes a fever among senior residents: 99 degrees qualifies as a fever among UPMC senior residents rather than the 100 degrees or higher normally used as a gauge.

Yealy said focusing on the elderly should mean fewer restrictions among the rest of the population.

“You may ask, ‘What about me? I need to get out of the house. I’m relatively healthy, I need to get back to work,’ ” Yealy said. “For healthy people in all walks of life … having the virus will likely yield either no symptoms or a symptom that feels like a cold or the flu.

“We are ready for a smart reopening of society in all the communities we serve,” he said.