Broward County is hardest hit by coronavirus. But testing is still limited by supplies.
One day after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was deploying the National Guard to help Broward County contain the novel coronavirus, hospitals there said they are still sending specimens for COVID-19 testing to off-site labs, where results take several days.
The reason? National supply shortages of a component used to run the tests. Of Florida’s 180 COVID-19 cases, at least 39 are in Broward County.
For its plans to set up a mobile testing site in Broward, the National Guard will work with Memorial Healthcare System, which is currently scouting a location near the intersection of Flamingo Road and Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines to keep potentially contagious people away from its hospitals where they might spread the disease to other patients and staff. But Memorial and other hospitals have been limited in their ability to do on-site testing in the meantime.
Memorial Hospital West is just north of Pines Boulevard on Flamingo Road. The intersection of those two streets is already one of the busiest in Broward County. Pembroke Lakes Mall is on the northeast corner, C.B. Smith Park is on the northwest corner, and large shopping plazas anchored by Trader Joe’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and BestBuy, and Publix and Walmart are on the southeast and southwest corners, respectively.
Since the emergence of COVID-19, testing has been limited throughout Florida, where healthcare providers first relied on a federal lab in Atlanta that took several days, then moved on to sending samples to state-run labs, which have a one- to two-day turnaround but have kept narrow criteria on who can be tested for the virus. Now, testing has expanded to private commercial labs, but those can take three to five days to return results.
On-site testing by hospitals would be much quicker, but supply shortages have slowed hospitals in the county that has become the epicenter of the novel coronavirus in Florida. Dawn White, vice president of government and community relations at Baptist Health South Florida, which runs several urgent care centers in Broward, said the healthcare system could not yet do on-site testing because it was waiting on a reagent that is on back order due to a national shortage.
“We have kits, but there’s a number of steps to the testing,” White said. “ ... We are looking for that reagent, using all sources available to us, and as soon as we have that reagent and can be approved and certified to run the test, we’ll start testing.”
A reagent is a substance that is a crucial component of the test used to detect the novel coronavirus.
That doesn’t mean Baptist Health isn’t testing people. White urged patients who think they need to be tested to use the hospital system’s telemedicine platform, but cautioned that there will be waits of up to 90 minutes.
Over the past two weeks, emergency departments at Broward County hospitals saw more people complaining of a cough, one of the symptoms of COVID-19, but the number of people complaining of other symptoms — shortness of breath and fever — were within expected levels, according to state data released Monday.
Dr. Stanley W. Marks, the chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare, said in a conference call with local and state officials on Monday that the hospital has the ability to do some on-site testing but hopes to drastically expand that soon, once it can obtain more of a reagent that is used to test for the novel coronavirus.
Marks said the hospital has not had any issues working with the Florida Department of Health to send specimens out for testing, but the state determines the criteria for who can be tested in its labs.
“There are very specific guidelines as to what can be tested right now, both in the [Department of Health] laboratories here in Florida and the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] lab in Atlanta,” Marks said.
Gino Santorio, the CEO of Broward Health, said that his main hospital, Broward Health Medical Center, has different testing equipment than Memorial Healthcare and will need a separate reagent to test for the novel coronavirus, and it is working on obtaining that. Santorio said he expects that reagent to be available after mid-April.
“Once those come out, we will be able to run a test in 40 minutes,” he said. “Ultimately, there’s a lot of different ways to test for this. Every facility is different.”
Santorio stressed that the supply shortages should not dissuade people from seeking treatment and that Broward Health has had no trouble sending specimens to commercial and state labs.
“We’ve not had trouble getting people tested that we feel need to get tested,” Santorio said. “However, that answer may be a little limited in terms of what it means, because we’re only swabbing and sending the tests out.”
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 5:21 PM.
