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‘We’re Simply Going to Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst’
An interview with San Francisco General Hospital Chief of Emergency Medicine
Elemental spoke with Christopher Colwell, MD, chief of emergency medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, to get an inside perspective on what doctors are experiencing on the ground with the novel coronavirus outbreak and how they are preparing to handle the situation if and when it escalates.
The information reported here is from March 22. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Elemental: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I know you must be incredibly busy right now, so I really appreciate it.
Christopher Colwell: It’s a remarkable time, no question.
First of all, what’s the testing situation at your hospital? Do you have enough tests for everybody?
The previous weeks, we were just testing patients that were sick enough to get admitted to the hospital. We didn’t have enough tests to be testing every symptomatic patient, so a lot of patients went home that could have been positive. We told them to assume they were positive and quarantine until they were asymptomatic and could get follow-up, but there were a number of patients that never got tested. Now we’re in a better phase where we’re able to test most symptomatic patients. We still don’t have enough to just test everybody, but we do test most patients that are coming in with symptoms.
What’s the bottleneck in the supply chain for the tests?
It’s the swabs, just the number of swabs. We’ve run into that, UCSF has run into that, Stanford has run into that.
And is there any relief on the horizon?
Yes, we keep hearing that we have more coming, both in terms of swabs and in terms of personal protective gear. We’ll believe it when we see it, but yes, there’s a lot of people that are ramping up on this.
Speaking of personal protective gear, is that a real concern in terms of masks and other equipment?
It’s a very big concern. We have enough today, and we have enough as near as we can tell for tomorrow. But…
