More people are visiting ERs to get COVID-19 tests. Please stop, hospitals beg.
Asymptomatic people worried they have COVID-19 and wanting a test have been clogging emergency departments at hospitals in Lexington, which is a problem, local health officials said Friday morning.
Providers and administrators from UK HealthCare, CHI Saint Joseph Health and Baptist Health Lexington said this notable uptick in people visiting the hospital with mild or no symptoms of the novel coronavirus began happening before Thanksgiving.
With hospitals already straining from treating an influx of seriously ill COVID-19 patients, providers want to make sure people are visiting hospital ERs for the right reasons.
“There’s a lot of angst in the community,” Dr. Roger Humphries, chair of emergency medicine at UK, said Friday morning in a virtual press conference. As community spread has intensified across the state, “we have seen a lot of what we call the ‘worried well’ patients in our emergency departments,” meaning patients whose anxiety over the virus may drive them to the hospital, but their symptoms aren’t acute enough to warrant that level of care.
“If your question is, ‘Do I have COVID?,’ there are many, many options better than our emergency departments to get that question answered,” Humphries said.
Dr. Mark Sloan, medical director for the department of emergency medicine at Saint Joseph’s, said since early November, 10 to 15 percent of the people who visit his emergency department each day are those with mild or no symptoms, worrying they’ve been exposed.
That volume is in the ballpark for Baptist and UK, as well. Emergency departments “are fairly overrun right now,” said Colleen Swartz, vice president of hospital operations at UK.
Hospitals don’t want to dissuade people from seeking care if they need it, they just want people to be selective and understand that hospitals, especially now, are congested with patients because of Kentucky’s coronavirus surge.
“If you’re symptomatic and you’re short of breath,” or experiencing other acute traditional symptoms associated with the novel coronavirus, “you should be seen by a provider. And certainly if your symptoms are severe [an emergency department] is the appropriate venue,” Swartz said.
But for anyone even with mild COVID-19 symptoms who are “just wondering if you’re COVID-positive because you may or may not have had an exposure, we have good alternatives for free testing in the community, so that we save space and resources . . . for the folks who need emergency care,” she added.
If you believe you’ve been exposed to the novel coronavirus and are considering going to a Lexington hospital for a test, you don’t have to travel far to get one at a more appropriate site. UK, for instance, just expanded capacity and lengthened hours of operation at one of its free testing sites in part of the Kroger Field parking lot, off of Alumni Drive.
Hospitals around Kentucky have contended with thinning resources, waning capacity and a shortage of health care workers in recent weeks as the state’s number of hospitalized coronavirus patients has reached record heights. Officials at Baptist, Saint Joseph and UK Friday morning said their hospitals are no different. While they’ve not run out of resources, “we’re already currently at a pretty strained time,” said Dr. Sloan, from Saint Joseph. Swartz, at UK, said, “we can’t afford any further shortages in our clinicians.”
Even in light of these ongoing challenges, “we still haven’t hit the peak yet,” Baptist infectious disease specialist Dr. David Dougherty said. With another round of holidays approaching this month, “we expect [hospitalizations] to continue going up through the month of January.”
Even though Kentucky will soon receive initial doses of a coronavirus vaccine, people shouldn’t get lax in their efforts to minimize transmission of COVID-19, which still poses a great threat, Swartz said. “We’re asking everyone to double down on those very basic habits,” like mask wearing, social distancing, and limiting the size of indoor gatherings to fewer than eight people.
“Those very basic habits that could seriously and literally save lives,” she said.
