Gov. Jay Inslee provides a press briefing Tuesday, May 5.
Washington state’s surveillance of COVID-19 will receive a harder push for wide-scale testing in long-term care facilities under a new order from the state Department of Health issued today, May 28.
Gov. Jay Inslee announced a new plan for testing based on the department’s order during a press conference. That order would set a two-week timeframe to see testing of all residents and staff in nursing homes, and a four-week timeframe for assisted living facilities with memory care units.
The governor explained testing will be offered to all residents with their consent. All staff of facilities will be required to be tested unless they have some medical justification not to undertake such a test.
Facilities that had completed a “prevalence survey” of residents and staff for COVID-19 in April or after wouldn’t be subject to the order, “essentially because they’ve already done it,” Inslee said.
Inslee said the state would be sending test supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) both for staff and residents to those facilities, adding that currently the state Office of Financial Management was working on an estimate for how much it would cost. The state would pay for the laboratory costs for facility staff — “for residents, presumably their insurance will take care of those (laboratory) costs,” he said.
Washington State Health Secretary John Wiesman said the order was continuation on work that began before the disease was identified in the state, with outreach to health care administrators on what COVID-19 was. He said the state saw a decrease in outbreaks in those facilities since April, which he said was due to the work of healthcare providers employing infection control strategies.
Wiesman said the day’s order would now allow a focus on facilities that had not had outbreaks, which could allow for discovery of asymptomatic cases of the disease. Wide-scale testing made more sense now than it did prior due to the prevalence of transmission of the disease from those who didn’t have any symptoms, Inslee added.
“We thought that was a possibility, but it has now become a certainty,” Inslee said.
Wiesman said that there could possibly be 25 to 30 percent of cases of the disease that were asymptomatic.
“We didn’t know that at the beginning of this outbreak. This is a new virus,” Wiesman said. “Previous coronaviruses didn’t act that way.”
Wiesman said the focus on assisted living facilities with memory care units was due to evidence showing higher incidence of infections there, a result of the nature of memory-related issues for those residents.
As to why the order comes now rather than before, Inslee said the lack of an adequate supply of testing materials kept such a large-scale action from reality.
“Had we had additional testing capacity, I think we could have done these things earlier, but that’s been a great limitation,” Inslee said. He noted Washington had received “several hundred thousand” testing swabs from the federal government delivered in the last several days, allowing the state to take the additional steps.
Wiesman said testing “will add to our thinking” about the response, but in and of itself wouldn’t directly lead to easing of restrictions at those facilities such as those on visitation of residents.
“We haven’t made any decision about how to best proceed,” but the expanded testing will provide additional information, Wiesman said.
