Outpatient COVID-19 clinic to open at State Fair Park
An outpatient clinic will open Tuesday at the alternate care facility at State Fair Park Expo Center in West Allis to provide infusions of a treatment for those with mild to moderate COVID-19, Gov. Tony Evers’ office announced Friday.
The treatment, bamlanivimab, was authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in mid-November.
The drug contains man-made antibodies that mimic those in patients who’ve recovered from COVID-19, the governor’s office said. The goal of the treatment is to “give the body more time to learn to make its own antibodies, limit the amount of virus in a patient’s body and help prevent serious illness from COVID-19.”
The clinic will be open every day of the week except for Christmas and New Year’s Day.
It will be able to serve 84 patients per week and will only accept those referred by a health system or individual hospital. There will be no walk-in appointments.
The number of patients per week is based on health systems’ projected needs and could increase.
The one-time procedure takes 2 ⁄2
1 hours, which meant space and social distancing considerations were also part of determining how many patients to treat, according to information provided by state Department of Administration spokeswoman Molly Vidal.
According to the FDA, bamlanivimab is authorized for patients who test positive, are at least 12 years old and weigh at least 88 pounds, and who are at a high risk for getting seriously sick or being hospitalized with COVID-19.
The clinic will only treat adults and will be giving priority to those who are at least 65 years old or who meet other criteria that put them at high risk.
The clinic will be set up in Hall A of the alternate care facility, which is “set back” from the inpatient area, according to the state.
The state-run alternate care facility is a 530-bed field hospital that opened Oct. 14 in an effort to prevent the state’s hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with COVID patients. It cost more than $15 million to build over the course of about 10 days in April.
Between Oct. 21 and Friday, 168 patients from across the state had been treated at the alternate care facility, according to the state Department of Administration.
The outpatient clinic will also be available to patients statewide, Vidal told the Journal Sentinel.
Both the alternate care facility and the outpatient clinic are primarily funded with CARES Act dollars that expire at the end of the year, but she said the state plans to find a way to keep them open as long as they’re needed.
Dr. Ben Weston, medical services director for Milwaukee County’s Office of Emergency Management, said Friday that the bamlanivimab clinic will be one of the efforts that will help turn the tide of the pandemic in the state, along with the alternate care facility, the vaccine and individual behavior.
“The evidence seems to be good,” he said of the treatment. “It’s not the most definitive evidence in the world but it seems to benefit people with those mild symptoms.”
“The evidence (for bamlanivimab) seems to be good. It’s not the most definitive evidence in the world but it seems to benefit people with those mild symptoms.”
Dr. Ben Weston medical services director for Milwaukee County’s Office of Emergency Management