Buffalo, NY (WBEN) - The impact of Coronavirus is beginning to be felt at hospitals in Western New York.
Even though it is not a hospital accepting Coronavirus patients, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has seven employees that have tested positive for COVID-19.
Dr. Brahm Segal, Roswell Park Chief of Infectious Disease, said it appears the positive cases were the result of community spread within the hospital.
“Right from the get-go, we put a huge emphasis on testing employees,” Segal said.
The threshold for testing at Roswell Park is much lower than for the general public, because of close contact with cancer patients who have compromised immune systems. Even someone with minor respiratory symptoms should be tested within the hospital.
That’s also the reason why contact tracing continues at the hospital, even though it has stopped at a county-wide level.
“For each of the seven employees, we are doing very meticulous contact tracing,” Segal said. “We are going to commit resources to see who might have been exposed at work. It’s becoming more and more appreciated that people with no symptoms can spread the virus.”
While it’s important to Segal to use those resources at Roswell Park, he knows that they are in scarce supply locally, and determining how to use them can dictate how successful the fight against the virus is.
That includes limiting testing, for the time being.
“Testing broadly to people who don’t have symptoms is absolutely the wrong thing to do, we will absolutely deplete our resources.”
And it’s time to add, not subtract resources in Western New York, even as Governor Andrew Cuomo talks about using hospital beds throughout the state to care for patients in New York City.