Tufts Medical Center hit a major milestone on Tuesday, throwing it back to before pandemic times when COVID-19 patients were not flooding the Boston hospital.
As of 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, Tufts Medical Center reported that the hospital was not treating any COVID patients for the first time since the pandemic started.
The last time there were zero COVID patients in the hospital was on March 21, 2020 — more than three years and 1,137 days ago.
Shira Doron, hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, woke up to a barrage of text messages from thrilled colleagues.
“‘Tears in my eyes’ and ‘A dream come true,’” Doron read on her phone.
“We’ve been in the trenches for three years, and it’s so amazing to get to this moment,” added Doron, who’s also the chief infection control officer for Tufts Medicine health system.
The peak of COVID hospitalizations at Tufts Medical Center was on April 21, 2020 — when a whopping 88 patients were being treated for the virus amid the initial spring 2020 surge.
Hospital leaders have been looking at the COVID patient numbers every day since the pandemic started, and they’ve often wondered when they would ever get down to zero COVID patients.
“It’s great to see, even if it’s only for the day,” Doron said.
The city of Boston reported 66 COVID hospitalizations in its most recent week of data, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.
Across Massachusetts, the state Department of Public Health reported that 204 patients were hospitalized with COVID as of last week. Nearly 4,000 COVID patients were in the hospital at the peak of the spring 2020 surge on April 21, 2020.
Doron noted the “hard work of the scientific community developing vaccines and treatments” to get to this moment with significantly fewer hospitalizations.
“People are now much less likely to end up in the hospital when they are infected,” Doron said.
The Biden administration has ended the COVID national emergency, and the World Health Organization has hinted that it will declare the pandemic is over later this year.
“We’re entering a phase where we won’t call it a pandemic much longer,” Doron said. “We will treat COVID like other respiratory viruses and pathogens.”
While communities came together in the spring of 2020 to bang pots and pans for doctors and nurses, Doron on Tuesday said she wanted to acknowledge the healthcare workforce for all of their hard work and perseverance over the last three-plus years.
“Under really unprecedented times, everybody came to work every day despite the danger,” she said. “Everybody did their job and worked harder than ever before.”
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