Delco officials detail steps to battle pandemic
State Rep. Chris Quinn, R-168 of Middletown, held a tele-town hall Tuesday night with regional experts to address constituent concerns ranging from health system capacity, testing, business impact to how schools are faring.
“This is an unprecedented health and economic crisis,” Quinn said of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than one million unemployment compensation claims being filed since most businesses were shut down to mitigate the virus’ spread.
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Brett C. Gilbert of the Main Line Health System shared some approaches being taken by his organization to address the situation.
Gilbert said Main Line Health began a coordinated response March 2 by establishing an incident command center at its Radnor corporate center and elevated it to a code orange, which mean it was responding to a regional disaster.
Since then, additional measures continue such as the focus on procuring personal protective equipment for its team members.
“We literally have leadership teams working around the clock to secure (protective equipment) from around the globe,” Gilbert said. “Part of our responsibility is to make sure we are protecting our staff for the long term.”
In addition, Main Line Health has created a surge planning protocol. “We wanted to be prepared for a large volume of patients coming in at one time,” he explained, adding that includes a three-tier surge model that can treat 1,600 patients throughout the system at one time with a doubling of the Intensive Care Unit beds in preparation for such an increase.
Main Line Health can also do rapid testing within its facilities to quickly identify COVID patients, he said, adding that the priority right now is to test those exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and other high risk individuals.
“Right now, we are limited by our supply test kits,” he said. “In the near future, as more testing becomes available and we have supply, we’ll expand our testing ... The goal is the entire population.”
Gilbert said there has been exposures to health care workers and others during the pandemic and that Main Line Health is continuing to care for patients through a variety of methods. He added that through the pandemic, Main Line Health has been having 1,500 appointments a day with patients through tele-health resources.
“The good news about this virus is that 80 to 85 percent of people will actually have mild or moderate illness,” he said. “Only 15 percent will have severe illness.”
Many of those experience the severe impacts of the virus have underlying risk factors, according to Gilbert.
Laura Goodrich Cairns of the Delaware County Commerce Center outlined some of the measures being taken for businesses.
“We have been diligently working with businesses in Delaware County to make sure they have access to programs at the federal and state level as much as possible,” she said, adding that center staff have been helping with navigating the SBA Disaster Recovery Loans and the Paycheck Protection Program.
She said they are also working with non-English speaking business owners through the use of volunteer translators.
When a question arose regarding the eligibility of sole proprietors for unemployment compensation, she said the CARES Act provides for these individuals to receive special pandemic compensation.
Marc Bertrando, superintendent of the Garnet Valley School District, spoke to how his school district is adapting to the everchanging environment, particularly with schools closed.
“From a school district perspective, things are going as well as can be expected,” he said.
Bertrando said teachers had been focusing on enrichment and review, as well as new learning, and by garnering feedback from students, parents and teachers, they continue to improve the process.
The superintendent said they also continue to program for students with special needs and ESL students.
And, that the district has expanded its meal providing service to not only students in need prior to the pandemic but to families it has identified who are now faced with economic hardships.
Delaware County Emergency Services Director Timothy Boyce spoke about the move of the Alternative Care Site being moved from the Glen Mills Schools to a site in East Stroudsburg.
“We were concerned greatly about our surge capacity,” he said. “Hospitals ... have done an incredible job of increasing capacity. The reality is we’ve increased our capacity to serve in our brickand-mortar hospitals. That is the safest place for someone to receive care.”
Because of their readiness, Boyce said officials here felt secure sending these resources to an area of the state that doesn’t have them.
“Northeast Pennsylvania doesn’t have the same resiliency that we do,” he said. “We felt that we were comfortable sending it up to them. The curve is getting better but we’re not ... out of the woods. We’ve done a better job of being prepared for what’s next. We didn’t want to hoard a resource for a need that someone else has.”