Okay, Boomer meme out: all 6 coronavirus patients in NJ hospital ICU are between ages 28-48
/
Shelter in place
Worse, Mike Maran, medical director of the Teaneck hospital treating these patients, is the first person I’ve encountered who has first-hand experience with this flu and the knowledge to opine on that experience. No paid talking head he, yet he’s worried:
Maron is a widely respected health care executive because he has proven a single-entity hospital can compete in quality of care with the bigger systems that surround him. He now knows Holy Name has another distinction.
“Holy Name is at the epicenter of the outbreak in New Jersey,” he said.
Maron said the past week has been unlike any other in his more than four-decade career.
“I can fall back on my cholera experiences in Haiti, which was devastating, considering the lack of basic medical supplies after the earthquake — and then the other things that came here, everything from MERS and SARS, and even when we ramped up for Ebola — this is unprecedented,” he said.
“I can tell you, it’s real.”
New York state is introducing drive-through testing, following the lead of Washington, California, Texas, Colorado and others. Seven states had introduced it going into the weekend. Plenty more — including New Jersey — are either considering it or getting ready to introduce it.
This concerns Maron ….
The tests are so new — and have so little history behind them — that Maron said he’s been told they are 90% accurate at best. And that’s for patients presenting with the known symptoms: fever, respiratory issues, gastrointestinal distress. For those who aren’t, Maron said, the accuracy is much lower.
“Here’s the concerns around lab testing that people need to know,” he said. “One, every sample has to be garnered under strict conditions. So, the sample taker has to be gowned in full PPE equipment. Precautions have got to be taken. You can’t just put up a test and have people show up. Gathering samples is not like swabbing for the flu. So, that slows down the number of people you can effectively swab.
“The second is that all these companies all use different assays to determine the RNA sensitivity to the test. And, because the (Food & Drug Administration) let people fast-track because we need to make more available, we don’t know for sure. I’ve had this conversation with the virologists at LabCorp, and they told me, ‘We don’t know the sensitivity of the test.’
“So, if you’re symptomatic, meaning you have a fever and cough, and I swab you and send that sample in, the accuracy of that is 90%. There’s a 10% chance it’s wrong, which is a pretty big window. This is opposed to the flu test, which is 99.999% positive. We’ve had enough testing on those and they have refined that the processes that they know for sure.
“This is complicated. It’s complex science. And, the best we can tell, it’s only 90% accurate. And there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate it’s otherwise.”
Maron said he’s explained this to elected officials.
“I said, ‘Governor, you do not want to do this,’” he said. “You’re going to give people a very false sense of security thinking they can drive through and get swabbed and say, ‘Oh, it’s negative. I’m clear.’
“That’s not good. That’s irresponsible.”
Expanding of testing appears to be coming anyway.
