At Miami’s public hospital, doctors and nurses ‘begging’ to do coronavirus tests
More novel coronavirus testing kits are on the way to South Florida, the governor said Wednesday, but he also raised new concerns about potential supply shortages of the swab tools that healthcare providers use to collect specimens for testing.
At a press conference at Jackson Memorial Hospital on Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the state had purchased 2,500 commercially available testing kits to screen for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and he anticipated those would be distributed to some 50 labs throughout the state, including at hospitals. Those kits would add the capacity to test for 625,000 people, he said, and Jackson would be one of the first to receive the kits.
“If hospitals can do this in their own labs, the turnaround could be quicker and they would be able to make better use of their resources here in their healthcare facilities,” DeSantis said.
For a week or more, healthcare workers at Jackson have been “begging” the state Department of Health for clearance to run tests, said Martha Baker, a registered nurse and the president of the union representing nurses and doctors at Jackson.
“Nurses and doctors in the emergency room are on the front lines, and they’re having to fight with bureaucracy to get a test,” she said.
Getting test results for the novel cornavirus can take at least 24 hours, including in the state’s public health labs. But DeSantis cautioned that even the new testing kits don’t come with the materials used to collect specimens, and added that there has been a national shortage of those tools.
“Many labs do have some supply, but our capacity ... is really dependent on how much of the materials are available or can be brought into the state,” he said.
A lack of widespread testing in Miami-Dade County has been a cause of major concern for local officials, as well as employees at Jackson, the tax-funded hospital network that treats more than 200,000 people a year at its emergency rooms.
On Friday, Jackson said it had only completed three tests for COVID-19. The reason: Florida’s Health Department controls who can be tested, and will only approve testing for a narrow subset of people.
Jackson CEO Carlos Migoya said Thursday after the press conference that the three-test number was now “inaccurate,” but he would not release updated figures on how many tests the hospital has done.
“Ask the health department,” Migoya said.
The Department of Health did not respond to a question from the Miami Herald about why testing results were not being released by county. Currently, only statewide results are being announced
Locally, nurses and doctors are doing what they can to protect themselves, despite limited ability to do the tests to determine which patients have the disease.
Baker, the nurse and doctors’ union president, said Jackson Health System had taken the right step by restricting the flow of potentially infectious patients to protect its workers, but said additional measures would need to be taken to screen visitors.
But even beyond expanded testing capacity, Baker said a lack of point-of-care testing, a diagnostic that delivers near-immediate results, makes it more difficult for hospital systems to protect their employees. The testing kits that will end up shipped to Jackson produce quicker results than state labs, but could still take several hours.
Miami-Dade authorities making decisions on community exposure to the virus say they don’t know how many people have been tested for it. County officials have also said they aren’t being told how testing numbers break down by county.
“We’ve inquired, to get the latest information on the number of tests for Miami-Dade County,” said Jennifer Moon, the deputy mayor assigned to oversee the county’s health-related operations. “We are awaiting a response from the Department of Health.”
On Thursday, DeSantis provided new statewide testing numbers that were not yet reflected on the state’s COVID-19 website, saying 392 tests have come back negative. He also said the 56-year-old Miami man whose positive COVID-19 test result was announced late Tuesday night had recently traveled to Iran, where there is widespread transmission.
Until new guidance was issued this week, testing had been largely restricted in Florida to those who have known travel history to affected areas or known contact with confirmed cases. The governor’s office on Monday said that testing was being expanded to include people hospitalized with unexplained shortness of breath.
DeSantis said there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the novel coronavirus but said the scientists so far have indicated that those not showing symptoms of COVID-19 are likely not contagious. But the evidence on that question is still unclear.
“They don’t really know. They think you have to be symptomatic. This is all being studied right now,” he said.
Dr. Lilian Abbo, chief of infection control at Jackson, said she took the governor’s comments to mean “we don’t know for sure,” but also agreed that people without symptoms should not be priorities for testing.
“We need to make sure the people who need to get tested most, get tested,” Abbo said.
Abbo answered questions from reporters only after the conclusion of a press conference where local politicians did all of the talking.
Baker, the president of the nurses and doctor’s union, said it was unfortunate that Jackson did not let medical experts speak publicly about the virus, which has already upended the lives of multitudes of Americans.
She added that it was also troubling to her that DeSantis was delivering less-than-clear messages on the potential contagiousness of the disease.
“I was most disappointed that the governor said that,” Baker said, referring to his remarks on asymptomatic people not spreading the virus. “That is why we need to do broader testing.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2020 at 2:29 PM.
