The deadline for long-term care facilities to start weekly testing of staff for the coronavirus has been extended. Facilities seem to be on track to meet it.
Long-term care facilities have seen the majority of virus-related deaths in Delaware, but were slow to start testing their staff for the virus. State officials made weekly testing of staff mandatory last month— then extended the deadline for the first round of this testing to the end of this week, citing delays in sending out supplies.
Officials say most facilities are using the saliva-based Curative tests the state purchased and are only paying to ship the samples to a lab in Washington, D.C.
Mary Peterson, long-term care incident commander at the State Health Operations Center in Smyrna, says one hundred percent of facilities in the state have submitted samples — but not all staff have been tested yet.
State Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) officials admit they do not know the total number of long-term care staff members in Delaware. But Peterson says 6,274 staff tests had been run as of Monday, and less than one percent have been positive for the virus.
“We were possibly expecting a three to five percent positive rate when the asymptomatic staff were being tested,” said Peterson. “But thank goodness — and I’m going to knock on wood— right now it’s at less than one percent, and I hope it stays there.”
As of last Friday, 433 long-term care facility staff members had tested positive for the virus and one had died from it, according to the state Division of Public Health.
Cheryl Heiks, executive director of the Delaware Health Care Facilities Association, says so far facilities are not seeing the staff shortages they expected to come from the testing.
And she says other issues facilities raised last month, like getting testing orders written for staff or paying for testing, have been resolved with the use of the Curative testing system. Heiks paints the process as time-consuming, but well worth the effort to contain the virus.
“The state took some of the issues that we had with the original universal testing [plan] that the state had done without consultation, and took our suggestions and the issues that we had with that and incorporated it into this new plan,” she said.
Peterson says facilities initially struggled to arrange shipment of the test samples, but state public health employees resolved that.
“Facilities have not been reporting any issues with completing and now sending the tests,” said Peterson.
Health officials have not given facilities an end date to the required weekly testing. But state public health director Dr. Karyl Rattay said Tuesday the state has received federal guidance about when the frequency of this testing could be decreased.
“We do anticipate that continuing to test our staff weekly will help prevent the introduction [of the virus] by asymptomatic staff members,” said Peterson.
DHSS Deputy Secretary Molly Magarik says testing is just one part of protecting vulnerable residents of long-term care facilities.
“We really need to deploy all the tools that we have at our disposal,” she said. “That’s face coverings for people out in public, it’s appropriate PPE [personal protective equipment] for staff, it's the infection control policies, it’s the testing … It really is a layered approach that provides the most risk mitigation for people.”
