Gov. DeSantis pushes for more testing at nursing homes.

New mobile testing unit will travel to long-term facilities

On Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he has a new way to help contain the spread of the virus in Florida’s elderly population who represent the bulk of the deaths in the state.

A new mobile testing vehicle will travel to Florida’s long-term care facilities to test residents and employees for the novel coronavirus and provide results in 45 minutes.

“We really believe this will be a game-changer,” DeSantis said at a news conference at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.

The vehicle will begin by traveling in Miami-Dade to areas with multiple nursing homes close together. Run by STAT labs, a Miami company, the mobile unit will run round-the-clock shifts and process about 500 tests a day.

“We will be able to go to longterm care facilities, get results back almost immediately and then if there is a case be able to isolate the worker or the resident appropriately,” DeSantis said.

National guard and contract nurses still will collect the samples and hand them off to the mobile lab to process. The Florida National Guard and health department staff have been collecting samples from residents and staff in Florida long-term care facilities, but they are sent out to labs that take about 48 hours to learn a result.

Already, the virus has infected close to 1,600 seniors in Florida’s long-term care homes and 1,550 staff, according to the Florida Department of Health data. Florida reported 577 deaths in senior-care facilities as of Wednesday morning. When the virus infects just one resident at a center, the spread can happen quickly. A Pensacola long-term care center has almost 100 cases. One such facility in Miami-Dade went from six residents who tested positive to 89 in a matter of days, according to data released by the Department of Health. DeSantis said bringing rapid testing to nursing homes is just the state’s newest way to protect nursing home and assisted living facility resident.

Early on, the state recognized that residents were vulnerable to an outbreak of the virus, which has a particularly deadly effect on the elderly. With this knowledge, the state required employees to wear personal protective equipment, but many of them couldn’t get the supplies they needed. The governor said the state now has supplied long-term care facilities with more than 10 million masks, 1 million gloves, a half-million face shields and 160,000 gowns.

“We were at the White House

last week going over what Florida has done and because we were so aggressive with personal protective equipment [PPE], FEMA has now begun doing what Florida has done nationwide, and they are also going to send some to Florida’s long-term care facilities. We think that’s an important way to protect the most vulnerable,” DeSantis said.

Some of South Florida’s hospitals also are working closely with long-term care in their areas to provide quicker test results. For example, Memorial began Monday to process samples from its own long-term facility, The Manor, as well as for Catholic Health Services, which has four nursing homes, two rehabilitation facilities, home health care and hospice. Ed Peterson, vice president of laboratories for Memorial Healthcare, said the hospital labs are able to deliver results in 24 hours.

“That’s much sooner than many commercial labs,” he said. “As a hospital this allows us to be proactive and we can take care of any resident or employees who test positive and may need care. We want to help minimize the risk of spread in these facilities by identifying when the virus is there.”