NORTHAMPTON — With testing for the new coronavirus still severely limited across the state, area hospitals grappled with the growing impacts of COVID-19.
Approximately 200 of Baystate Health’s 12,000 employees are now out of work on quarantine because they either had a respiratory illness or had a possible exposure to the virus, President and CEO Mark Keroack said Wednesday.
“All of this will be made much better if we had readily available, quick-turnaround testing as well as more plentiful supplies to protect our employees,” Keroack said.
Baystate Medical Center in Springfield said Wednesday it had three more patients test positive for the virus after announcing two confirmed cases on Saturday. Baystate also had another two dozen possibly infected patients in isolation as of Saturday.
At Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, 25 to 30 employees have been furloughed or are under self-isolation, according to hospital spokeswoman Christina Trinchero. The hospital employs approximately 2,000 people.
Cooley Dickinson announced its first two cases identified as positive by the state on Wednesday, and said it would have more data available Friday morning.
Holyoke Medical Center declined to provide numbers to the Gazette on Thursday, despite the fact that it is both testing for, and treating if necessary, COVID-19 cases.
“The information is being provided to the state, not reporters,” director of marketing Rebecca MacGregor said in an email.
The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Massachusetts jumped to 328 on Thursday, up from 256 reported Wednesday. Cases reported for Franklin, Hampden and Hampshire counties were still below the hospitals’ numbers, at one, three and one, respectively.
The state Department of Public Health reported that of the total, 43 were hospitalized. Of the total, 97 are linked to a meeting by the biotech company Biogen Inc., 46 are local transmissions, 34 are travel related, and the rest are under investigation.
Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said Thursday the state aims to administer 3,500 tests a day by the beginning of next week with the help of private testing facilities, up from about 400 tests per day now.
However, there continues to be a shortage of personal protective equipment at health care facilities across the country.
On Thursday, the president of the state’s nurses union, Donna Kelly-Williams, wrote to Gov. Charlie Baker, saying that facilities still lack sufficient personal protective equipment, or PPE, for their staff. Nurses have had to reuse PPE without taking appropriate safety measures, said Kelly-Williams, herself a nurse.
The letter also said that testing for the virus is still not widely available, and that possibly infected people are showing up at hospitals that aren’t prepared to triage, test and treat them in a proper setting.
Kelly-Williams also said that nurses are concerned about a lack of capacity at hospitals to treat a potential influx of COVID-19 patients after years of bed, unit and hospital closures and staff reductions across the state.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this story.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.