Coronavirus test site will open in Hialeah and ramp up to 1,000 tests a day by April
Larkin Community Hospital opened a drive-thru site in Hialeah on Friday with the capacity to run 500 tests a day for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and the potential to ramp up to 2,000 tests a day in the next three weeks.
Jack Michel, a physician and Larkin’s CEO, said the non-profit hospital is using a subsidiary lab and a private lab in New Jersey to process the tests. Patients will wait two days for positive results and four days for negative results, he said.
“We’ve been trying to get this done for three weeks,” Michel said, explaining that Larkin’s efforts have been slowed by a shortage of supplies, such as collection swabs and reagent, chemicals needed to process tests.
Once Larkin receives the necessary reagent, Michel said, it will boost its testing capacity by 1,000 tests a day.
He said the hospital owns a high output testing machine called Panther, which is capable of processing tests and delivering results in several hours. But Larkin is waiting on a shipment of reagent, which he estimated would arrive during the first week of April.
“There’s only one of these machines in the state of Florida,” Michel said. Baptist Health South Florida also has the capability for high output testing. However, Baptist Health is also waiting for reagent and it’s unclear if both hospital systems are using the same brand or type of machine.
High output testing
He said the Florida Department of Health’s three testing labs have machines capable of processing “40 to 50 samples a day.” The state has also outsourced testing to private labs.
“They’re not built for a pandemic,” he said of the health department’s machines. “There are high output machines that can do more.”
The drive-thru testing site, located at Larkin’s Palm Springs campus, is not open to the public and will be limited to healthcare workers, first responders including police and firefighters, Hialeah and Miami city employees, and federal employees, including air marshals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers and those who staff detention centers.
Those who meet the criteria can sign up for a test using a website Larkin created to screen potential patients. The website is https://cvtesting.larkinhospital.com/en/.
Michel said those who want to be tested must be experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, including cough, fever and shortness of breath. Once an applicant’s information has been screened, Michel, who is a licensed Florida physician, will sign the orders himself, and an appointment will be provided for testing.
“They don’t need to go to a doctor,” he said. “As long as they certify that they have those symptoms, they can pretty much get an appointment.”
Ramping up capacity
In addition to the drive-thru testing site, Larkin also is converting a 25-bed wing in a restricted area of the hospital to negative pressure rooms, which are needed to care for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Negative pressure contains airborne pathogens in a single room and prevents cross contamination from room to room.
Larkin, which owned and operated a Hollywood nursing home where 12 people died after Hurricane Irma knocked out power to the facility in September 2017, has not had a single COVID-19 patient yet at any of its facilities. Michel said that may be due to a lack of testing.
Michel said Larkin first needed approval from the Food and Drug Administration to operate the high output Panther machine, and that the hospital received federal permission quickly because of the FDA’s emergency use authorization for medical devices in response to COVID-19.
Then Michel tapped Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees to intervene on Larkin’s behalf with Hologic, a medical technology company based in Massachusetts, which sells the Panther testing machine and the reagent needed to process tests.
“We’re on a back order for reagent,” he said, “because they prioritized the Department of Defense.”
More testing needed
Ramping up testing in Florida will be critical for public health officials and policy makers to mount an adequate response to the coronavirus outbreak.
As of 5 p.m. Thursday, the Florida Department of Health had reported performing 2,128 tests — about the same number that Larkin administrators say the high output testing site would be capable of processing in two weeks.
The state health department has reported 520 total cases of COVID-19 as of Friday morning, including 474 among Florida residents, with 124 cases in Broward County and 113 in Miami-Dade County.
As testing increases and gives state health officials a more accurate picture of the coronavirus’ spread in the state, that information will help elected officials make better policy decisions, Gov. Ron DeSantis said.
“We don’t really have a good sense of that right now,” DeSantis said on Thursday at a press conference to announce the opening of a drive-thru site in Pembroke Pines. “That is definitely information we need, and that would inform how you go forward.”
For healthcare workers seeing a spike in emergency room visits that mention cough and fever, the ability to test patients and even people in the community who are asymptomatic is key to controlling the outbreak, said Martha Baker, a registered nurse and president of the labor union that represents 5,000 healthcare workers at Jackson Health System, Miami-Dade’s public hospital network.
“The biggest push to really get our arms around this virus is to know where it is,” Baker said, “and the only way you can do that is by broad testing. ... That should be a priority strategy.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2020 at 4:10 PM.
