Hospitals cite staff shortages

Around the state, test site operators said they’re working to increase the number of appointments they can offer.

Kumar, of Hartford HealthCare, said the network was testing roughly 250 people each day, on average, in early December. As of Tuesday morning, Kumar said, that daily figure had risen to between 1,500 and 2,000 people.

Kumar said the testing operations at their six driveup locations and roughly two dozen urgent care centers have the supplies they need readily available and labs can quickly turn around results after nearly two years of practice. But the network’s biggest challenge to adding more COVID-19 test appointments is finding people to staff its sites.

Despite that hurdle, the health network said Friday it plans to open seven new testing trailers across the state in the coming week, increasing its testing capacity by 25 percent. The trailers are easier to staff and keep workers warmer than the tents that have often been used, health leaders said Friday.

Yale New Haven Health was conducting about 20,000 testing appointments weekly a year ago. Now it is offering about 31,000 testing appointments per week. But even that volume is not enough to meet demand. A spokesman for Yale New Haven Health said 99 percent of appointments are filled, noting some slots are held for its health care workers and first responders, patients with scheduled procedures and others.

Dr. Scott Roberts, associate director for infection prevention at Yale New Haven Hospital, said the network has curbed testing for people who are asymptomatic.

“It's more the staffing to do the tests,” he said. “We just had so many people, so many health care workers who are getting infected and having to stay home, and so we're prioritizing for the highest risk individuals such as symptomatic people, people who are exposed who we need to know if they're positive several days after the exposure, and not prioritizing as much for situations where we really should be testing but we simply don't have the capacity.”

Stamford Hospital is offering 300 testing appointments per day at its Bennett Medical Center campus, double the 150 per day it doled out during the slower summer months. Liz Longmore, senior vice president of ambulatory services and consumer and patient experience for the health system, said during the summer, same-day appointments for testing were readily available and not all slots were taken. Now, all slots are booked for the next week.

Longmore said Stamford Health also opened 300 appointments per day during last winter's surge in cases. But the demand for those same number of slots this season exceeds what the organization saw last year. So, she said, Stamford Health is hiring for new staff in order to expand capacity to test beyond the usual winter surge they prepared for.

"We ensured that we had stockpiled testing supplies, that we had staffing in place, but we are seeing demand that is above what we saw last winter," she said.

A list of COVID-19 test locations posted online by the state of Connecticut and United Way includes about 400 sites across the state, of which 116 test at no cost to patients.

Pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens, among the largest testing operations in Connecticut and across the United States, each declined to answer specific questions about how many appointments are available to Connecticut residents.

A CVS spokeswoman said “we have the inventory and capacity to meet ongoing COVID-19 testing and vaccination needs, including in areas of high demand.”

But just a couple of open appointments were available to schedule online for a lab-based diagnostic test at CVS sites anywhere in the Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport or Stamford areas as of Friday afternoon.