Sacramento County says region will see testing capacity for coronavirus expand this week
The leader of Sacramento County’s Department of Health Services said Sunday that physicians in the Sacramento region will have greater access to testing for COVID-19 starting Monday because LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics will have approval to do the analyses locally.
Dr. Peter Beilenson said the local laboratory has been constrained because it hasn’t been able to get more testing kits from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have 20 tests that we can do a day,” he said. “We’re obviously full every day. ... It’s clearly a shortcoming of the CDC, in terms of not having enough tests out there.”
Hospitals, physicians and consumers around California have expressed frustration over the limited access to testing. Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, said her coworkers have received calls from hospitals concerned about the limited access to testing.
“Across the state,” she said, “this is one of the questions that is arising. But it is not in the hands of hospitals.”
Dr. Theresa Cheng, a senior emergency room resident who works at several hospitals, said it’s true that doctors don’t have the ability to run as many tests as they need, but individual hospitals are developing their own testing capability. Stanford University, for instance, is now running tests for its patients.
At one hospital where she had worked on Friday, she said, doctors wanted to rule out the possibility of the new coronavirus, but the county health department said they didn’t have the capacity to send someone to pick up the samples. Consumers should know, though, that medical experts are working to identify the best path forward.
“I overheard a conference call that involved chief medical officers of hospitals all throughout the state,” she said. “Even though I was in Oakland, I heard people calling in from San Diego and L.A., and all these experts at their own institutions are coming together and sharing advice and key practices. I think that people are putting in a lot of work and taking this extremely seriously and trying to act as quickly as possible.”
Flu or COVID-19? The sick worry
Long Beach residents Aaron Swanson and Katrina Hagen spent last week wondering whether COVID-19 had invaded their household and whether they should be allowing their three children to go to classes at schools and colleges in the area. The couple came down with fever and coughing, two of three symptoms of COVID-19, and felt that ethically they couldn’t go out of the house if they didn’t know for sure whether they had it.
Hagen said: “I had traveled to Salt Lake City and my friend there had been in Seattle for a week. Then I became sick. My friend from school who picked me and my daughter up from the airport became sick. The husband of the friend that I stayed with in Salt Lake City had become sick with flu-like symptoms, and then my husband came down with it.”
The couple’s son has Down syndrome and respiratory issues, Hagen said. When she and her 16-year-old daughter got back from a trip to Utah on March 2, she said, she started having chills and fever that night. She’d arranged a tele-health visit with a doctor Tuesday and got a prescription for Tamiflu.
Then Swanson started experiencing fever Wednesday night and worked from home on Thursday. He said he didn’t want to go into the office at Northrop Grumman because so many of the coworkers and contractors he interacts with daily are aged 60 or older. Statistics show that people in that demographic, especially those with comorbidities, are at elevated risk for complications from the new coronavirus.
Hagen, who has asthma, said she still was having trouble breathing Saturday, so the doctor recommended she go to urgent care. That clinic, however, didn’t have the ability to do a flu test, so the doctor recommended she and her husband go to the emergency room to be tested.
At the ER, Hagen said, the couple expected that they might be screened in a tent to avoid the potential risk of of exposing anyone to COVID-19, and they found one at Long Beach Memorial Hospital with a health care worker dressed in protective gear. They told the worker that they’d both gotten flu shots, that Hagen had been exposed to someone who’d been in Seattle during the outbreak there, that they had COVID-19 symptoms, and that none of their children was showing symptoms, Hagen said.
‘How did you get back here?’
The worker sent them to the ER front desk, she said, and they were shown back to an exam area. When they told the ER doctor there the same information they shared in the tent, Hagen said, she asked them: “How did you guys get back here?”
The ER team gave them the rapid flu test, Hagen said, which showed they had Influenza A. The couple couldn’t have been happier, she added, to learn they had the flu. They chalked it up to a strain of flu that wasn’t covered by this year’s flu shot.
By Monday, Swanson said, he won’t have been feverish since early Saturday morning: “Even if I have a residual cough and sound a little nasally, I can go to work and reassure people because people are pretty worried. And, I can also feel ethically OK about it.”
What troubled Hagen, though, was that the ER doctor told them that if their tests hadn’t come back as being positive for flu, that she wouldn’t be testing them for COVID-19. Rather, Hagen said, she would simply recommend that they confine themselves to their home for 14 days, the maximum incubation period for COVID-19.
The limitations on testing have left Hagen suspicious.
“They’ve had testing in Germany,” she said. “They’ve had testing in Italy. The World Health Organization had tests. Why are we having such a problem with tests? The test kits and the test capabilities, that’s where we need answers. This is not where we should be right now.”
Beilenson said that, until Tuesday, county health departments also had to get approval from the CDC to do a test. That often was hard to manage, he said, because the CDC’s “phone lines were busy day in and day out.”
Tests allow those exposed to someone who had COVID-19 to avoid isolating themselves for 14 days, Beilenson said, and in turn, they reduce the workload for local public health investigators who must check twice a day to ensure people are adhering to self-isolation. In some cases, he said, grief-stricken relatives are delayed from planning services for their loved ones because they’ve been placed in isolation.
This story was originally published March 9, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
