{"id":8821,"date":"2020-07-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2020\/06\/08\/in-the-heat-of-battle-against-covid-19\/"},"modified":"2025-03-19T11:40:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T15:40:23","slug":"in-the-heat-of-battle-against-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/in-the-heat-of-battle-against-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"In the heat of battle against COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Selfie<\/a>

Sue Shugart ’88 with colleagues on the night shift at KershawHealth. The hospital had one of South Carolina’s first two COVID-19 patients, and the town of Camden became the first area with community spread.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a heat map of South Carolina<\/a>, COVID-19 first appears as a dim blue dot over the city of Camden that swells and turns green, and as other dots start to appear across the state, the cloud over Camden, in Kershaw County, erupts and billows into a yellow mass that turns red, like a deadly storm moving across a weather radar.<\/p>\n

The original dim blue dot was a patient admitted to KershawHealth for respiratory symptoms but who did not meet the then-current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria for suspicion of \u00a0the novel coronavirus. On the second day in the hospital, the patient wasn\u2019t responding to therapy, and her physician became suspicious that COVID-19 was also a factor. The next day, after prodding by the hospital\u2019s infectious disease specialist, a skeptical state lab tested the patient for COVID-19.<\/p>\n

On March 6, the test came back positive. It was the state\u2019s second confirmed COVID-19 test; the other was for a person in Charleston County who had traveled to France and Italy, where the pandemic was widespread.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were off to the races,\u201d says Sue Shugart \u201988, a veteran healthcare leader who was just seven months into her role as chief executive of KershawHealth.<\/p>\n

Within days, several KershawHealth patients tested positive COVID, and the state health department said Camden was likely experiencing \u201ccommunity spread,\u201d meaning the source was unknown, \u201cand the risk of spread to other communities is possible, as seen in other states across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shugart\u2019s team established a COVID ward, which filled quickly, so they doubled its size. Soon, every ventilator the hospital owned, and every vent it had borrowed, was in use, and some patients had to be transferred to larger hospitals. At the peak, patients in more than 30% of the hospital\u2019s 70 staffed beds were suffering from or suspected of having COVID-19.<\/p>\n

On April 7, a \u201chome-or-work\u201d order went into effect across South Carolina. People started social distancing and the siege lifted.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made it through,\u201d Shugart says. Her hospital had tested 1,000 patients for COVID-19 and treated 144. Eleven patients died; three while hospitalized at KershawHealth and eight after being transferred to other hospitals.<\/p>\n

Asked if the pandemic was the hardest challenge she\u2019s faced as a healthcare executive, Shugart says, \u201cI sure hope so. I don\u2019t want anything more challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shugart handled her hospital\u2019s crisis with leadership skills she honed as an English major and a student leader at Furman. She was vice president of student government, a member of Senior Order and Omicron Delta Kappa<\/a> (and a recipient of the ODK\u2019s Winston Babb Memorial Award<\/a>), and she served on the admissions advisory council.<\/p>\n

Communication, transparency, building trust and being present for her staff during long hours all helped Shugart navigate through the COVID crisis. She walked the hospital checking on staff several times a day, especially at night before she went home.<\/p>\n

One of the hardest moments came at 10:30 one night, when she told staff on a medical nursing unit that they had been exposed to COVID. But Shugart still needed them to come to work every day \u2013 and some who were home quarantining had to return \u2013 under new precautionary guidelines from the CDC. \u201cOr else we couldn\u2019t operate the hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was supposed to return to Furman as a member of the Spring 2020 class of The Riley Institute\u2019s Diversity Leadership Institute. Shugart attended two meetings; the third was scheduled for March 12, when her hospital was in the throes of COVID-19.<\/p>\n

She emailed Riley Institute Director Don Gordon, on May 1, apologizing for having to drop out. \u201cAs I prepare to leave the hospital tonight, I am not planning to come in for the next two days,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnd that will be the first time I can say that since March 4!\u201d<\/p>\n

As a Furman student, Shugart says she developed critical thinking skills, and she learned to \u201cunderstand other perspectives and to see myself through a different lens.\u201d She also learned to recognize her own biases, something she hadn\u2019t encountered before. \u201cMost of that happened in my coursework and with my professors that I\u2019m still grateful for.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s using those skills to better understand, and draw attention to, social determinants of health outcomes. People of color face greater challenges in health care, from increased risks of chronic diseases and higher death rates, to shortages of healthcare providers of color.<\/p>\n

According to a paper published May 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, \u201cAfrican American individuals and, to a lesser extent, Latino individuals bear a disproportionate burden of COVID-19\u2013related outcomes. The pandemic has shone a spotlight on health disparities and created an opportunity to address the causes underlying these inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shugart saw this first-hand. \u201cWe saw how patients were fairing. We noticed (the disparity) before it made national news,\u201d she says. \u201cHow we go about solving the disparity, it\u2019s even more important to me now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

By May 1, COVID-19 was widespread across South Carolina.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s also important to clear up misconceptions about the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the flu,\u201d she says. Everything about COVID-19 is novel. There is no evidence-based medicine for COVID because there is no previous evidence. She worried about her staff becoming infected from being in the community (a handful did). She worries still about the eagerness for people to gather in public, especially in a Southern town steeped in Sunday church traditions.<\/p>\n

The state health department publishes a rolling heat map every two weeks. On June 2, the map still showed blue and green blotches festering over most of South Carolina, with angry red and yellow clouds persisting over Greenville, Columbia, Florence and Charleston.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf people really understood that the measures are supportive,\u201d not curative, Shugart says, wishfully. \u201cIn the U.S. we\u2019ve become accustomed to knowing there\u2019s a pill to fix it or a surgery to fix it no matter the medical problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not for COVID-19. Not yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a heat map of South Carolina, COVID-19 first appears as a dim blue dot over the city of Camden that swells and turns green, and as other dots start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":389,"featured_media":18613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,26,3,60,63,17,31,59,29,68,5],"tags":[270,313,246,255,262],"class_list":["post-8821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-administrative","category-alumni","category-alumni-profiles","category-career-services","category-centers-and-institutes","category-english","category-pre-health","category-riley-institute","category-shucker-leadership-institute","category-top-four-news-1st-story","tag-alumni","tag-alumni-profiles","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36739,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8821\/revisions\/36739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}