A health worker on Wednesday at a community testing tent set up in Denver by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Jeremy Samuel Faust is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of Health Policy and Public Health, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.The views expressed are solely those of the author.
When Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston received notice over the weekend that there would be an influx of dozens of people with suspected exposure to, our teams moved quickly to activate a screening and testing plan in the ambulance bay outside the hospital. That plan, still in place, allowed staff to field potential covid-19 patients outdoors while continuing to deliver emergency care for everyone else inside. Heart attacks and cancer complications are indifferent to the covid-19 scare.
In most cases, patients with suspected illness should be swabbed, sent home and told to stay there until test results are available. Only patients who are seriously ill should be evaluated and treated in emergency departments. If, when and where this virus becomes prevalent, there will be many who badly need medical treatment. At that point, it will be crucial that hospitals not be overwhelmed by people with milder symptoms — or by frightened people just seeking to be tested.
Our colleagues in South Korea have shown us the way. By carrying out large-scale testing, they have measured