Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
High case number in Hollywood misleading
City is able to test more than others
If you comb through Florida’s daily coronavirus numbers, the city of Hollywood stands out. More people are infected there — on average — than anywhere else in South Florida. But what’s going on in Hollywood could be closer to the truth of what’s going on with the virus in the rest of the state.
“It’s not that we have more cases,” Hollywood Mayor Josh Levy said. “It’s that other places don’t know what they have.”
According to data from the Florida Department of Health’s Wednesday evening report, almost one out every 1,200 residents in the city of Hollywood has tested positive for COVID-19, out of a population of about 150,000. The neighboring city of Fort Lauderdale, population 178,000, has one case for every 2,300 residents.
But because Hollywood has a major testing lab within its municipal borders, its high rate of infection also shows that more
of its residents have been tested than other municipalities. That means there’s more data about the virus there than in other places.
Since March 1, Florida has finished only about 17,000 coronavirus tests. That’s not a lot, given the fact that about 21.3 million people live in the state. About 2,900 of those tests have been from Broward County, where 355 people are infected and 87 of them, according to the state’s health department, live in Hollywood.
Nearly 10% of all the state’s tests have been completed in a lab located in Memorial Hospital South in Hollywood. And the high percentage of completed coronavirus tests provide a partial indication of how many infected people are actually out in the community.
“If Memorial is only testing symptomatic people, instead of screening people not showing symptoms, you can easily say that for every case they see, there’s at least two more, likely,” said Dr. Aileen Marty, a professor of infectious diseases at Florida International University, “That’s just how it works; that’s science.”
Using Marty’s rough estimate, there might be some 260 cases of coronavirus in Hollywood.
The high number of documented infections also mean the city is — paradoxically — safer. “It’s better to know what you have, because in those cases patients have been traced and are isolated,” Mayor Levy said. More people in the city — on average — have been tested and isolated than in any other city in South Florida, a practice that helps to check the spread of the virus,
And even as drive-thru coronavirus test sites around Broward County shut down or cut back because of a lack of supplies, the testing and tracing going on in south Broward doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop any time soon.
Ever since Memorial Hospital South’s coronavirus testing capacity came online on March 11, the hospital has been running about 200 tests for the pathogen a day, according to Dr. Stanley Marks, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare Systems.
The tests, he explained, are only for inpatients or for people in the emergency room who meet the testing guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But they’re fast, with results sometimes coming back in as little as 1.5 hours, compared to the days it may take at a private diagnostic center or state lab.
And even in those limited circumstances, the tests can still act as a powerful check on the spread of the disease.
Most patients diagnosed with the new coronavirus actually aren’t hospitalized. They’re told to go back home and quarantine, Marks said. Then the Florida Department of Health gets in touch with them, and starts the meticulous job of tracing, monitoring, and possibly also asking all of the people associated with the patient to isolate themselves as well.
“It’s a fairly sophisticated model carried out by the health department,” Marks says.
It’s the identification, isolation, and contact tracing that keeps the contagion from spreading. But that’s going to get harder going forward, since drive-thru testing sites around Broward are shutting down because of a lack of supplies.
On Tuesday, the Pompano Beach Broward Health mobile test site, behind the Festival Flea Market on Sample Road in Pompano Beach, suspended operations temporarily because it ran out of the swabs needed to take samples.
And on Wednesday, the Pembroke Pines test site, staffed by Memorial Healthcare, the Florida National Guard and the Florida Department of Health had to temporarily suspend taking new appointments, because they were afraid of running out of test kits, said William Manley, a representative of the Florida National Guard. A three-day supply of test kits arrived at the last minute, and the drive-thru test site is continuing to operate.
The experience of Hollywood, with its very own lab located within city borders, underscores the critical need for wide-ranging coronavirus testing across South Florida.
“Military doctrine teaches you one thing,” said Marty, a former Navy doctor. “Attack with overwhelming force. If you do it right, it will suck for a little bit, but then it won’t, instead of this prolonged social disruption.”