Thomas Breen photo
A coronavirus test conducted in Day Street Park.
Yale New Haven Health has signed a new contract with the state to expand its Covid-19 testing to 10,000 a day by the end of June — and to bring that testing outside of the hospital and into the community through mobile vans, nursing home visits, and neighborhood testing sites.
YNHH President and CEO Marna Borgstrom delivered that news Wednesday afternoon during the regional health care system’s most recent coronavirus-related virtual town hall, held online via the Zoom teleconferencing app and on Facebook Live.
The digital press conference was the seventh such question-and-answer session that YNHH has conducted since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in Connecticut in mid-March. Click here, here, here, here, here, and here for stories about previous YNHH-hosted virtual town halls over the past two months.
Zoom
Borgstrom (pictured) and YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak announced that the health care system, which includes seven hospital campuses in Connecticut and Rhode Island, recently signed a new agreement with state government designed to significantly increase the availability of Covid-19 testing throughout Connecticut.
Balcezak said that the health system currently conducts around 1,000 tests a day, primarily at YNHH’s various hospital campuses, including in New Haven on York Street and on Chapel Street. YNHH also runs a local drive-through testing site on Long Wharf at 150 Sargent Dr.
Borgstrom said the newly inked state agreement “anticipates that by the end of this month, we will be testing 5,000 people for Covid” each day. “By the end of June, we will have doubled that to 10,000 cases a day. And by the end of the summer or August, we hope to get to 20,000.”
“We have committed to the governor that we will be making a large portion of this testing available for testing patients and staff at nursing homes,” said Balcezak, “and also to try to quell outbreaks and do testing around individual cases as they are discovered.”
That means that YNHH will be partnering with city governments in New Haven and Bridgeport as well as with federally qualified health centers in New Haven to “make use of community resources to make testing sites more available to where people live,” Borgstrom said.
She said those new testing sites might be located at “schools that are not being used.”
YNHH Senior Vice President, Public Affairs Vin Petrini (pictured) said that YNHH has “proposed the use of vans to access neighborhoods and group homes” with mobile tests.
Borstrom stressed that the goal of this planned expansion is to “support availability and access” to testing as opposed to requiring people interested in getting tested to travel to one central location, like a hospital campus.
Balcezak said that this testing will be conducted in some instances by YNHH staff, in some instances by other medical providers. “We are going to begin starting this next week,” he said about the expanded testing.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article about the new agreement between the state and YNHH.
YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak.
Other updates included:
• Borgstrom said that the regional health care system currently has 487 Covid-19 positive inpatients in its various hospitals throughout the state and Rhode Island. That number is down from a little over 600 inpatients last week, she said, and from a high of around 800 inpatients towards the end of April. “It doesn’t mean by any means that this is over,” she said about the reduced number of hospitalizations, “but we are making progress.”
She said that 430 coronavirus-positive YNHH patients have died over the course of this crisis, and that YNHH has successfully discharged roughly 2,500 patients who have partially or fully recovered.
“We are still seeing a slow reduction of cases in our hospitals,” Balcezak said. But, he cautioned, that decline is dependent on “all of you out there in the community continuing to practice the social distancing that is so hard and so critically important” for reducing community spread and new hospitalizations. “It’s extremely hard, but very much appreciated that our communities are continuing to practice social distancing.”
• Balcezak said that YNHH has seen a total of five child patients who have suffered from Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome, a rare toxic-shock syndrome likely associated with Covid-19. He said one child patient has successfully recovered and been discharged from the hospital, while four remain in hospital care.
He said that child patients with this syndrome present with fever, rash, cracked lips, conjunctivitis, swelling of hands and feet, and shortness of breath.
“If your child is sick, don’t delay care,” he said. He urged parents to call their family’s medical provider or physician if their children exhibit these symptoms.
• When asked if she thinks that Connecticut is ready for the governor’s Phase 1 reopening on May 20, Borgstrom said, “I am very impressed with the thoughtfulness that’s going into this by the people that have advised the governor. It isn’t a full reopening. It’s a phased reopening.”
She said that increasing testing and contact tracing will be key to ensuring that the phased reopening doesn’t lead to a spike of infections and hospitalizations.
And she said that the hospital system is working to create isolated areas for care for Covid-19 positive patients and the staff who treat them so that it can resume the elective procedures that have been largely cancelled and postponed during the first two months of the crisis.
YNHH COO Chris O’Connor (pictured) said that the hospital system plans to ease back into conducting elective procedures by ramping up “mammography and other screening areas” as well as by increasing ambulatory surgeries at the McGivney Advanced Surgery Center in New Haven and at the Shoreline Medical Center. And he said the hospital will also soon resume seeing patients at the Winchester Chest Clinic.
O’Connor said that YNHH’s current surgical volume is at around 20 percent of what it was before the start of the crisis.
• Borgstrom said that the hospital system continues to see a significant daily operating loss during the crisis because of the reductions in elective procedures, the high volume of very sick patients, and the cost of setting up new intensive care units and ramping up testing. Last week she said that the hospital system was losing around $1.5 million a day.
On Wednesday, she said that YNHH has likely seen a net “$300 million to $350 million swing in our projected performance this year from an operating gains and operating losses” perspective.
According to YNHH’s 2018 annual report, the local hospital ended that year with a $245.7 million operating surplus.
She said that the hospital system has begun to receive aid from both the state and federal government. She said most of the state aid has come in the form of “advanced payments that have to be repaid” and have been provided “in order to prop up our cash flow.”
“The thing that concerns all of us the most is that if people don’t feel safe and comfortable coming back into a health care environment,” then the hospital will see even steeper losses because of reduced elective procedures and increased treatment of patients who are very sick and for whom the hospital can secure relatively less in reimbursements.
She added that layoffs and furloughs for YNHH staff “is nowhere in a plan right now.”