Mayo Clinic says 90 percent of Covid-19 patients are now enrolled in clinical trials

If you caught anything today from Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Rochester, it probably has to do with his decision to defy Mayo Clinic’s face mask policy. The move has sparked an uproar on social media.

As a result, #maskgate — as we have been calling it — has received considerable attention from the national media. And perhaps for good reason — why is the vice president above rules meant to save lives?

That debate will continue on, but for this report, we wanted to get to a few noteworthy items from Tuesday that might otherwise get lost in the fast-moving news cycle.

So, here are three key (nearly) politics-free takeaways from a round table discussion with Pence featuring Mayo employees Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, president and CEO; Dr. Amy Williams, executive dean of practice; Dr. Andrew Badley, chair of Mayo’s Covid-19 research task force; Dr. Bill Morice, president of Mayo Clinic Laboratories; and Haley Kuffel, a registered nurse at St. Marys Hospital who has been on the front lines of the pandemic.

(Spoiler: they have little to do with the vice president himself. If you are looking for a recap of Pence’s visit, we published that story earlier.)

Mayo ready to scale testing abilities

Mayo has been in the news of late for its ambitious partnership with the Walz administration and the University of Minnesota to produce upwards of 20,000 tests a day. But for Mayo, that’s just a fraction of what its labs — which processed 25 million tests in 2019 — are capable of handling.

On Tuesday, Mayo officials said its labs have the capacity to move forward with millions more tests related to the coronavirus. So far, Mayo has processed about 150,000 Covid-19 tests from across the U.S.

“We have the opportunity to truly scale at the national level,” said Farrugia.

Though Mayo’s capabilities extend well beyond the state, the institution has repeatedly stated it will continue to prioritize the needs of Minnesotans.

On Tuesday, Gov. Walz said his goal now is to make sure every symptomatic person in Minnesota is tested. By increasing testing, officials believe they will be able to more effectively trace and isolate the virus — leading to a process in which the state can gradually begin to re-open society.

“Those are the steps that will be necessary to get people back to what they want to do,” said Walz. “They want to work, they want to get back out again, and they want to start doing the things that make life great.”

Promising treatments

On the research front, Dr. Andrew Badley, chair of Mayo’s Covid-19 task force, said of the nine drugs being investigated as potential treatments, three to four are showing signals of activity.

Badley also noted that approximately 90 percent of Covid-19 patients in the Mayo Clinic system are now enrolled in clinical trials.

The combination of the experimental drugs along with the fact that the hospital system has not been overwhelmed with patients has led to some “very good outcomes,” he said. In the Rochester system, the death rate from Covid-19 has been one percent — with five deaths out of 500 cases.

“We believe these are making a difference for all of our patients,” Badley said of the clinical trials under way at Mayo.

Among the trials being offered is convalescent plasma therapy. Mayo researchers leading the national initiative said this week that plasma has been given to almost 2,600 patients. Early results suggest no major safety problems along with anecdotal evidence of patients improving.

During his time in Rochester, Pence urged individuals who have recovered from Covid-19 to donate plasma. (More info on how to donate here.)

Mayo makes pitch for telehealth

Mayo leadership also used their time with the vice president to make the case for greater federal support of telehealth.

Dr. Williams noted the practice has allowed Mayo to continue assisting patients even as the pandemic limits the number of people who can access Mayo sites in-person. She pointed to the Clinic’s role in using telemedicine to consult Covid-19 patients at New York-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital.

“We can reach more individuals than we were ever able to reach before and we can keep them safe at home,” said Williams. “It will also help our efficiency once people do come into our medical centers, because we can do some pre-visit work that we haven’t been able to do as robustly in the past.”

Related: Pandemic prompts pivot toward telemedicine

Farrugia said Mayo physicians are now holding more telehealth appointments in a single day than they did in all of 2019.

During the round table, Pence said the administration is “looking right now at how we make permanent some of those changes in telehealth,” including allowing patients to meet with providers across state lines.

The full video from today’s round table can be found here, courtesy C-SPAN.

Sean Baker is a Rochester journalist and the founder of Med City Beat.