Health official expects COVID-19 cases soon

While there have been no confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the region, Whitman County Public Health Director Troy Henderson thinks a pending batch of about 20 tests will contain at least one positive result.

“There is a high likelihood that COVID-19 is currently circulating in Whitman County,” Henderson said in an email to area public health officials of the illness caused by the virus. “We will be receiving a number of test results this Friday and Monday, with the anticipation that there will be positive results among them.”

Reached Wednesday afternoon by the Lewiston Tribune, Henderson said there are about 20 tests pending in Whitman County. Two negative tests have already been returned for COVID-19, which the World Health Organization has now labeled a global pandemic.

But Henderson said that while testing will continue to be necessary and valuable, its limited availability nationwide has put containment of the coronavirus behind the curve.

“I think, eventually, we will be able to test as much as we want to test,” he said. “But at that point we will have ceded the advantage. We needed to be able to test in the beginning. We’ve had this disease in the U.S. for over two months. It would be naive to think it hasn’t spread quite a bit.”

Washington public health officials and health care providers had only two labs up and running to conduct tests prior to this week, Henderson said. And even now that some commercial labs have the capability, getting results is taking too long.

“It should take a couple of days, and its four to five,” he said. “It is what it is, and we’ll do the best we can with the resources that we have.”

He pointed to U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams’ announcement Sunday that strategies are starting to shift from containment to mitigation. Those steps continued to manifest Wednesday, with Washington State University announcing plans to switch to online classes later this month, and the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College planning to test online classes.

Other social distancing strategies continued to spread, including public school closures around the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak in Seattle and Washington banning gatherings larger than 250 people statewide.

In Idaho, local public health officials are encouraged by the steadily increasing access to testing now that two commercial labs are available in addition to the state’s lab, according to Public Health North Central Idaho District nurse Mike Larson.

“(State officials) said we’re gearing up to handle the influx, but they’re still encouraging cases to be prioritized,” he said of the limited resources. “Ultimately, if somebody needs to be tested, we do have the capability of getting that done in Idaho.”

Those criteria include people with known exposure to someone who has tested positive, those who have traveled to an area with an outbreak and those who are severely ill. But now that the state capabilities are improving, testing has been opened to people outside those boundaries who a physician still wants to be tested.

Larson and Asotin County Public Health Administrator Brady Woodbury both said those doctors are able to independently send test swabs to labs without the need to notify their local public health officials. Neither were able to say how many people in their respective jurisdictions have been tested, however.

“The actual swab is just your typical synthetic swab on a plastic stick that you’re going to put into viral transport media,” Larson said. “And that’s widely available. Then you just have to get it to the place that’s going to do the test so they can then put it into their machines.”

But Woodbury said that while the swabs are readily available, Asotin County is running short on those “viral transport media” that Larson referred to, which are essentially secure test tubes used to safely send the swabs between facilities. But if tests start to come back positive and pile up locally, he expected more resources like the tubes to be quickly sent to the affected areas.

All the officials wanted to remind the public to follow simple protective steps, including frequent hand-washing, social distancing, staying home when sick, following health care providers’ instructions and calling ahead to primary care providers if feeling ill to be screened for coronavirus risk.

Mills may be contacted at [email protected] or (208) 848-2266.