‘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…
