Brandon Sun readers requested specific questions be asked at Monday’s COVID-19 news conference with chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin and Lanette Siragusa, chief nursing officer with Shared Health.
Question: Are all hospitals in Prairie Mountain Health region capable of caring for COVID-19 patients, or are these patients transferred to the larger centres? If they are transferred, which hospitals are they transferred to?
Siragusa: Every hospital is capable of managing a COVID-19 patient. COVID-19 patients can be quite fine on their own at home. It really depends on not so much the label of COVID-19, more so about what is their acute care needs.
If they need more intensive medicine, or critical care, then no, not all hospitals are capable of providing that. There are some very low acuity COVID patients in the hospital who are quite fine to be, as I said, at home or in any hospital. If they do require to be transferred to critical care or an acute medicine, if they were in Prairie Mountain Health, they would refer to internal medicine physician, most likely, and have that consultation, and then they can determine together where’s the best place for the patient to be.
We would consider Brandon being a an intermediate hub. And, in Brandon, our critical care doctors, the team, actually meet daily so that they can co-ordinate who is going where and what are the care needs. It’s individual and dependent on what the patient’s needs are, but there’s a pathway.
Question: I have heard that if someone tests positive for COVID, they have to wait 14 days and then they are allowed out of quarantine, and that there is no re-testing to ensure they are negative before they are cleared. This would be highly concerning if it were true, considering it is well-known people can test positive for much more than 14 days.
Roussin: It’s a good question, and it deals with the nature of the test. And then it deals with the evidence. When we look at the vast majority of people with COVID, eight days after the symptom onset, the vast majority of them are recovered.
They can’t transmit the virus anymore. In Manitoba, we use 10 days. If the person no longer has a fever, and the symptoms have improved. The test, the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, doesn’t look for viable virus. That test just looks for remnants of virus. So, absolutely, if we relied on a negative PCR test before people are lifted off restrictions, most people would be on for a month or more. But they’re not infectious. When we compare this to a culture, actually trying to grow viable virus, we find that almost no one can grow that virus after eight days of symptom onset.
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