Christopher Peak photo
At the Sargent Drive collection site.
Yale New Haven Hospital has established its first local testing and specimen collection center on Long Wharf where, only with a doctor’s order and a previously scheduled appointment, patients can be tested for a variety of respiratory viruses, including the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Once they receive permission, patients can now pull into a parking lot, drive up to a tent where nurses in purple masks and blue scrubs ask for their information, then continue on to another tent where technicians in full protective gear, including gowns, gloves and face shields, take a swab that will be sent off for processing.
YNHH spokesperson Mark D’Antonio announced the opening of that Specimen Collection Station in a Tuesday morning email press release.
The local station is located at 150 Sargent Dr., and will be open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
The regional hospital system also opened on Tuesday a specimen collection stations at Bridgeport Hospital — Ahlbin Center garage, 226 Mill Hill Ave. in Bridgeport, which will be open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m and Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
And it opened a third new collection site at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital — Parking lot A at 365 Montauk Ave. in New London, which will be open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. 5 p.m., weekend times to be determined.
Those three new testing sites join a fourth site that YNHH opened in Greenwich last week at Greenwich Hospital in the lower level physician parking lot off of Lake Avenue, which is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“To protect patients and healthcare workers, Yale New Haven Hospital has established a Specimen Collection Station that will collect specimens only from individuals with a physician order,” D’Antonio wrote in Tuesday’s press release. “At the request of the physician and with an appropriate physician order, the patient can be tested for a number of respiratory viruses, potentially including COVID-19.
“Patients will receive results from their physician once the tests are processed and completed – test processing does not take place in this station. Yale New Haven Hospital established the station as a precautionary measure to safeguard the health of our patients and healthcare workers by limiting their exposure to individuals experiencing symptoms.”
D’Antonio stressed in a follow-up email that this center is not a walk-up station. People must first talk with their primary care provider and receive a doctor’s order transmitted to the hospital through the Epic healthcare software system before being assigned a time to come to the center.
YNNH is one of seven hospitals throughout Connecticut that have been given special permission by state officials to do “drive-through testing” for those who have doctor’s orders.
Their goal is to keep potential cases of the highly contagious COVID-19 isolated, rather than having patients expose others while they’re waiting in the doctor’s office.
Up to now, public health experts have said that the United States is lagging far behind in its testing capabilities, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out faulty test kits and, with the Food and Drug Administration, blocked other labs from using their own tests.
“The idea of anybody getting [tested] easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told federal lawmakers last week. “Do I think we should be? Yes. But we’re not.”
“That is a failing,” he added at the House hearing. “Let’s admit it.”
As of last week, public health laboratories across the United States have only been able to do about 2,700 tests every day. That’s barely one-fifth of the daily testing capacity in South Korea, a much smaller country that experts point to as a model for how to track the spread of COVID-19.
Based on that limited testing, the Connecticut Department of Public Health has reported 41 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, including four in New Haven County.
Thomas Breen contributed to this report.
This is an important first step. But about 30% of New Haven households don't have cars. YNHH needs to figure out a way of safely testing them.