Here’s what we know about coronavirus testing in Centre County so far
Cases of the new coronavirus continue to increase in Pennsylvania, but Mount Nittany Health officials say there are no confirmed cases in Centre County.
The health system, which runs Mount Nittany Medical Center and several outpatient centers in the county, has tested five to seven people presenting symptoms over the past several weeks, but all those tests came back negative, Dr. Nirmal Joshi, chief medical officer at Mount Nittany Health, said Friday.
Up until this Monday, said Joshi, health systems with people presenting symptoms for the new coronavirus, known as COVID-19, were only able to conduct testing through the Department of Health’s state lab in Exton. No health care providers in Centre County have the ability to test for COVID-19 in-house.
How are patients tested for COVID-19?
On Monday, commercial companies Quest and LabCorp started offering commercial coronavirus tests nationally. Commercial testing is now available in Pennsylvania, Joshi said.
“The problem, however, is that the turnaround for the tests is up to a week, so it’s a taking a while,” Joshi said. “So in situations where if someone were to be quite ill, if we were to want to test — particularly in a hospitalized individual — the quickest way to have the test done and returned is through the state Health Department.”
Due to patient privacy concerns, Joshi declined to say whether Mount Nittany is currently testing people for COVID-19.
Mount Nittany is following state DOH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for deciding which patients to test for coronavirus, Joshi said.
Typically, a person with all three symptoms — fever, dry cough and shortness of breath — who had traveled to a Level 3 country is considered “high risk” for testing, he said.
But it’s the other cases that make it more difficult to determine if testing is needed, he said, like patients who exhibit some of the symptoms and have traveled to a high-risk area within the U.S., or patients with all three symptoms who haven’t had exposure to high-risk areas.
Before recommending a COVID-19 test, health care providers test for the flu and other viruses similar to the flu, Joshi said.
What should you do if you have symptoms?
Mount Nittany is recommending anyone who was in a high-risk area and believes they may have COVID-19 symptoms call their doctor’s office ahead of time so that staff can prepare.
Depending on the severity of a person’s condition, Mount Nittany will recommend three courses of action: to stay home and self-isolate; to come into a doctor’s office; or to come into the emergency department.
Mount Nittany also has a COVID-19 Preparedness and Response Team, which is made up of: Joshi; Carrie Hanley, infection prevention and control manager; and people from a clinical setting, the medical center and physician group, said Lou Brungard, vice president of facilities and plant operations at Mount Nittany Health.
“This is our mechanism to obtain information, process that, and be able to develop guidance, policies and procedures to keep our staff informed ... and ensure that we’re providing the highest level of safety,” he said.
“Frequent handwashing remains the single most important infection control measure,” said Joshi. He also recommended distancing oneself from other people, ideally by 6 feet, or 3 feet if working in a setting where contact is required.
Coronavirus cases increasing across Pennsylvania
The total number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 in Pennsylvania as of 5 p.m. Saturday is 47, with over 1,300 cases across the U.S. and 38 deaths nationally. The first cases in in the western part of the state were reported Friday.
At a Friday afternoon press briefing, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine said now that testing is commercially available in the commonwealth, health care providers may use their own judgment and do not need to conduct testing for COVID-19 through the Department of Health or consult the department.
Levine was insistent that there “are no backlogs of testing” at the state lab. She also said the state is not currently conducting population-based serologic testing, in which blood testing is administered to individuals who have not tested positive for COVID-19 but live in a community where the virus spread. Those tests are different from the tests currently in use, which utilize a nasal swab.
“That would be beyond us at this time,” she said.
As of Saturday afternoon, there are about 400 people under investigation for COVID-19 with 150 tests pending in Pennsylvania, according to the Health Department. There are 41 presumptive positive cases from state testing with six confirmed by the CDC.
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 6:13 PM.
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