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BURLINGTON — The University of Vermont Medical Center is now able to test for coronavirus on site and receive results within hours instead of days, hospital president Stephen Leffler said Wednesday.
Leffler said that the hospital was able to launch on-site testing Tuesday after a month of work by the hospital’s lab. He said with the development of the in-house testing, the hospital’s testing capacity was the best it has been.
“We are actually doing real-time testing at the hospital, that’s a huge opportunity to increase the capacity of the number of tests we can do, and it also improves how fast we can get results back,” he said a press conference with Mayor Miro Weinberger.
The mayor also announced that there had only been one additional positive test at Decker Towers after the state did blanket testing there, for a total of two positive Covid-19 patients there.
The state has seen a decrease in positive Covid-19 tests in recent days, and Leffler said the hospital has been steady with around 20 Covid-19 patients. The hospital continues to have additional ICU and ventilator capacity, he said.
Leffler said that while the hospital does not have an “unlimited” number of tests, it is receiving more each day. He said that testing at the hospital allows the medical center to prioritize which tests are processed fastest.
Before the hospital had its own testing capacity, it was depending on the state, which has limited capacity and an out-of-state lab that was processing tests from around the country.
Leffler said the hospital was increasing its testing capacity on a daily basis.
“We’re not at the point where we have unlimited testing, we don’t have testing on demand for every Vermonter,” he said. “But we are exponentially closer to that today than we were last week and a month ago.”
Annie Mackin, a spokesperson for UVMMC, said the hospital could do around 118 tests a day and was working to expand its capacity.
The state has “absolutely” flattened the curve of the spread of the disease, Leffler said.
“The things we asked Vermonters to do, and Vermonters have made the very difficult decisions to do, stay home, stay away from each other, have saved a lot of lives,” he said. “And I think we are going to stay on a flatter curve.”
Leffler said there has notb been a major spread of the disease among hospital staff, with 29 UVMMC employees contracting the virus out of the total 8,000 employees at the hospital. He said that the hospital believed only half of those 29 caught the virus at work.
Eighteen of the 29 have recovered and are back at work, while the remaining 11 are recovering at home, Leffler said.
“I think that is reassuring for our staff, that the protections they are using expertly are working for them, are keeping them safe, because like I said we’d like it to be zero and not another infection,” he said. “We are working on that every day.”
Weinberger said Wednesday that state Health Commissioner Mark Levine told him Tuesday night there was only one additional positive test at Decker Towers.
Ben Truman, a spokesman for the Department of Health, said the department tested 136 people at Decker Towers, which has 152 residents and 50 staff members. Truman said the results of the test would be publicly available after all individuals had been notified.
Weinberger said the state’s testing relaxed fears of an outbreak at Decker Towers, an apartment building owned by the Burlington Housing Authority. There was one self-reported case of Covid-19, which prompted the testing.
The city also has decided to abate Church Street Marketplace fees for businesses as the city was no longer providing the Church Street Marketplace Department services during the lockdown. This translates to $175,000 in relief for those businesses, Weinberger said.
