Conn. gets approval to test for virus
Prepare but don’t panic. That’s the message Connecticut’s U.S. Senators, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, Gov. Ned Lamont and a slate of medical professionals are emphasizing as the threat of a widespread coronavirus pandemic inches closer to Connecticut.
“This is a serious disease and we are taking it very seriously,” said Michael Ivy, deputy chief medical officer at Yale New Haven Health, during a community roundtable in Milford Friday afternoon. “We’re prepared. Understand that probably 80 percent or so, a significant majority of people, will not get very sick. However it does have a 2 percent mortality rate so it needs to be taken seriously ... we have been diligently preparing for weeks.”
Lamont said no cases of coronavirus have yet been detected in Connecticut and no patients in the state are currently under investigation for possible exposure. But he announced Friday the state’s Department of Public Health laboratory in Rocky Hill is ready to test for the virus if and when residents become infected.
The approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration means that if the epidemic arrives in the state, the state can save time and money by testing in-state and not sending tissue samples to CDC testing sites in Atlanta for diagnosis.
“That’s positive but we need more support from the federal government,” Lamont said. “We need more testing devices available so that each and every one of our health care providers can set that information up. We need support in terms of protective gear and masks. We have a month’s supply. We’ve planned for this, we’re thinking about
this, but depending on the scale of what this problem could become, we want to be ready for that going forward.”
Awareness and preparedness
The virus, which lodges deep in the lungs, has been found in at least 56 countries so far, and on Friday a second person in Northern California was reported to be infected with the disease without having any known risk factors such as travel to China or exposure to somebody known to be infected. That means the highly infectious virus may already be circulating in the United States.
Hundreds of Americans who had potentially been exposed to the virus have been quarantined at military bases in the U.S., and the CDC has recommended travelers avoid all nonessential travel to China, Iran, Italy and South Korea, all countries where the disease has been widespread.
Those infected typically experience flu-like symptoms, and the majority of cases will be mild, doctors said Friday. Children seem to be less affected by the disease, they said, and those who are older or who have existing lung conditions should talk extra precautions.
There is no vaccine for the disease and one is not expected to be immediately available. There is no preventative medicine available, and people are advised to take all the same precautions as they would for the flu including frequent hand-washing, staying home from work or school if any symptoms emerge and drinking plenty of water.
State Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, a physician who specializes in pulmonary (lung) medicine, cautioned against overwhelming emergency rooms, which in the event of widespread virus transmission, will need to be available for the most vulnerable populations.
“There is not medicine for this. The only reason to go to a facility is for physiologic management like fluids and oxygen,” Anwar said. “I can tell you with respect to the transmission rates, it is almost twice as likely to be transmitted than the flu. The bad case scenario is one-third of the population can get infected if we don’t have proper systems in place. If onethird of them get infected, then approximately 5 to 7 percent of those infected are going to require hospital or ICU level of care and that’s when you need a lot more testing systems, a lot more fluids and in some cases a high number of ventilators.”
Ivy, the Yale New Haven official, said people who are older should have a lower threshold for deciding when to at least contact their physician.
Blumenthal said personal protection supplies such as masks are in short supply in Connecticut as well as nationally, and that the only solution will be increased domestic manufacturing. He warned against panicked purchasing as there is only one type of mask — the n95 respirator mask — considered effective in protecting against the virus, a nod to his days as the Connecticut attorney general when consumer protection was one of his top priorities.
Point person
Many of the state’s universities have canceled travel to China and Italy, and those with study abroad programs have either mandated or given students the option to return to the U.S. where they will be tested and monitored for the disease.
Renee Coleman-Mitchell, the state’s public health commissioner, met with CDC and other health officials in Washington, C., this week, and has been appointed the state’s point person on management of the disease and coordination with the federal government.
The state’s Public Health Department has been in constant communication with local health departments, and has made all information available on its website and advised local departments to do the same. Murphy advised the public to follow their local health departments on social media, and check the state CT.gov website in addition to the CDC and World Health Organization websites regularly for the most up-to-date information on the spread of the disease.
“We’re very engaged in this,” Ivy said. “There is an active effort to be very prepared for what seems very likely to occur, which is there will be community transmission of the disease, of the coronavirus within the state of Connecticut. I think there has been an attempt to control this disease, but it is very likely.
That’s just the reality of it and we would be unwise not to prepare.”
Doctors across the state have already begun monitoring for the disease, asking patients if they’ve recently traveled and diligently checking for symptoms in patients visiting emergency rooms, though they note that many people carrying the virus may not exhibit symptoms.
“This is going to be a test for our public health system,” said Dr. Rockman Ferrigno, emergency medicine specialist for Bridgeport Hospital. “We have great medical facilities we have great systems, but this is going to be a real test for how do we handle the information flow, how do we care for patients that aren’t real sick, and how do we care for patients that are very ill? We need to understand that we’re going to have needs that we don’t even know we have.”
Politics and economics
Blumenthal met with health experts in Hartford Friday morning before traveling to Milford, and said he learned more about the spread and management of the virus than he did in a classified briefing with top officials in the Trump administration. He slammed President Donald Trump’s response to the illness in his opening remarks at the roundtable conversation.
“I think it is both a sign of the expertise and knowledge of our state and local officials and our hospitals and public health executives, but it’s also a sign of what we find so alarming in our nation’s capital,” he said. “Science has been politicized, science denial has been legitimized, and that kind of blindness to truth has consequences. Diseases don’t care what your politics are.”
He added that there is “deepening bipartisan alarm about our administration that seems more intent on clamping down on information and controlling the message than keeping us safe.”
Murphy issued a reminder that although the virus originated in China, it does not discriminate
“We need to be vigilant, but we should not be irrational and we should never be discriminatory, and there is a risk here of acting in ways that are both irrational and potentially discriminatory,” he said.