ETSU Health held a soft-opening Tuesday for their newly established coronavirus community testing site, which is open 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday in the clinic parking lot at 325 North State of Franklin Road.
“Yesterday went very well,” ETSU Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs Dr. Sheri Holmes said Wednesday morning. “Knock on wood, no major glitches. Of course, you know, we’re fine-tuning processes as we proceed.”
Holmes said a team of people from ETSU Health, including those in ETSU Health’s leadership group, devised the idea for the site last week to offer broader screening opportunities for the community.
“Part of determining how this virus is spread and part of preventing the spread is to keep the people out of circulation that are carrying the virus,” Holmes said. “And we know that there are people that are either mildly affected or even asymptomatic that are actually carrying the virus that are infecting other people. So, it just makes sense that with broader screening, you can better control the virus because you can remove those people, quarantine them, isolate them – whichever needs to happen – to prevent other people from being infected.”
Tests will initially be limited to keep providers and health care workers on the front line safe. This front line currently includes four ETSU medical student volunteers, two nurses doing collection and two people doing order entry and printing labels.
Holmes said the City of Johnson City sent people from city management and traffic management to the site Tuesday. She said there were no issues with traffic, but they expect the following days to be different now that the word is out.
“Yesterday, after the line shut, there were probably about 100 phone calls after the line shut,” Holmes said. “We expect quite a deluge of folks today, and it’s going to be strictly first-come first-serve because once we reach the max for the day – and we’re not certain what that number is going to be – but once we see that the system has absorbed all it can absorb then we will then have to stop screening for the day.”
The site accepts both insured and uninsured patients, but uninsured patients will receive a bill. According to Holmes, they do not currently have money through ETSU to pay for these tests. Holmes said the government says it will pay, but no mechanisms are in place for free tests at this time. If the clinic is reimbursed, they will void bills given to uninsured patients.
Screenings are only available to people experiencing coronavirus symptoms and who have been pre-registered and pre-screened over the phone by ETSU Health staff via ETSU Health’s coronavirus hotline at 423-433-6110. Drive-up or walk-up screenings are not available.
“You need to have a reason to be tested – not just to be tested,” Holmes said. “Because we don’t have unlimited resources here, so the folks that need to be tested need to be able to access the system. It would be nice if we could just test everyone who wanted to be tested, but if you’re not symptomatic, then we need – at this moment in time – to save those resources for the people who are sick.”
When calling the screening hotline, patients will be given detailed instructions of precautions to take before coming to the site. Patients must arrive in a private car with functioning windows and will be directed by signs for when it is safe to roll down their window. They will be given a mask and gloves upon arrival for the protection of health care workers at the site.
The test is a Nasopharyngeal swab, which collects a sample from the from the back of the nose and throat. Unless they decline, patients will also be tested for flu because many symptomatic people who come will be infected with the flu, and not with coronavirus, Holmes said. Test results should be available within 72 hours.
Holmes emphasized that the site is only a collection site, and that it is neither a medical evaluation site nor a registration screening site. People who are acutely ill should call 911 or contact emergency services, and people with symptoms who need to be evaluated should call their primary care physician, Holmes said. People without primary care can call ETSU Family Medicine or Internal Medicine, and ETSU students can access the University Health Center.
“This is simply a collection site for people who meet the screening criteria that feel like they need to be tested, but there will be no medical evaluation on scene and no registration at the scene,” Holmes said. “And the reason for that is because the process – our goal – is to minimize the direct health care workers’ exposure to the virus. So, the less time that those windows are rolled down on those cars, that’s the less chance that our health care workers are going to be incidentally exposed.”
Although Holmes said their primary goal is to identify infected people to lessen the spread of the virus, they also hope to gain statistical knowledge about the spread of the virus and the number of mildly symptomatic people with confirmed cases.
“There’s lots of things on the back end that we’ll be able to look at in retrospect: the cost to the economy, to the healthcare system, to the entire system as a whole,” Holmes said. “So, there’s lots of meaningful information that we will gather from this just by identifying the people who are affected.”
For more information about the testing site and ETSU Health’s services, visit https://www.etsu.edu/etsu-news/2020/03-march/covid-19-testing.php or https://www.etsu.edu/coronavirus/medical/. For pre-registration, ETSU Health’s Coronavirus Testing Hotline can be reached from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 423-433-6110.
