A&E COVID-19 alert

To date no doctor, nurse or patient warded at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) has tested positive for COVID-19.

However, 12 persons who visited the Accident and Emergency Department (A&E) tested positive for the respiratory viral illness.

Speaking at a press conference at the QEH this afternoon, acting Director of Medical Services Dr Clyde Cave said he was unaware of any nurse having contracted COVID-19 while at work.

And while he said A&E had recorded a dozen positive tests, he said none of those persons had been on a ward at the QEH prior to being tested.

“No. We have had nurses who have been tested and no doctors, as far as we are aware, have contracted it in the hospital.

“For confidentiality reasons we may not be aware as an employer if somebody is off on sick leave but I believe the total number of identified cases in the country at this time is about 90, which is still relatively small and so far we’ve been really lucky and that compared to other healthcare workers throughout the world ours have been protected so far,” Dr Cave said.

“The ones we have watched especially closely were all the workers who looked after the initial sick patients over at the Enmore isolation facility before they moved down to Harrison’s Point and none of those health workers has contracted COVID-19.”

Dr Cave also dismissed a report that one of the seven persons who died from COVID-19 had been warded at the QEH prior to being diagnosed with the respiratory illness.

“Not as far as I am aware for a patient in our hospital setting, meaning the inpatients. Our A&E is obviously our interface with the community and that’s why we have had to rearrange the whole A&E and move the relatively well ones upstairs and the potentially affected ones kept downstairs until we can determine what their status is,” he pointed out.

“Some of the COVID-19 infections did present at the hospital and they were down there and some of those would have subsequently demised. Literally they would have been a hospital patient while they were here, but they were not an inpatient on the ward.”

Dr. Chaynie Williams, Clinical Director, Emergency Services Directorate at the QEH revealed that the hospital had not recorded a positive COVID-19 test for over a month.

“We have tested several patients and of them 12 have been positive so far and the last one was around April 11. So we haven’t had any positive tests although we still continue to test patients as they come to the A&E since then,” she said.