Pa. Health Department begins testing for coronavirus; UPMC races for its own test

The Pennsylvania Department of Health has begun its own testing of potential coronavirus cases, opening the door for quicker results.

“We are testing samples as we speak,” Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said Tuesday.

She said the state has been sending samples for testing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for the past month.

“Prior to pretty much yesterday, all of the tests in the country were being done at the CDC, so we were following very strict CDC criteria,” she said, stressing that there are no confirmed cases of the novel virus in Pennsylvania.

Health care systems across the state have indicated they intend to begin their own testing once they are approved to do so by the Food and Drug Administration, Levine said.

In the meantime, UPMC is working to develop its own test for the new coronavirus disease, named COVID-19.

“We are working quickly to develop our own testing capacity so that any cases could be identified more rapidly,” Dr. Graham Snyder, UPMC’s medical director of infection prevention, said during a news briefing at UPMC Montefiore in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. “This is obviously a priority.”

Testing has been limited not only by the CDC’s criteria, but also by the availability of tests and the two- to three-day turnaround time. That time will be shortened to within 24 hours with tests processed by the Department of Health at its laboratories in Chester County, though they can only get through about six samples a day.

“We expect to detect cases in Pennsylvania during the coming weeks,” said Dr. Kristen Mertz, a medical epidemiologist with the Allegheny County Health Department.

Mertz said she’s most concerned about outbreaks at long-term health care facilities as well as other places with a large amount of elderly people because “that population is so vulnerable.”

There have been no reported cases of the highly contagious coronavirus at any of UPMC’s 40 hospitals and clinics across Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, said Dr. Donald Yealy, UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. The Downtown Pittsburgh-headquartered health care system, which employs more than 90,000 people, similarly has no reports of COVID-19 linked to employees or patients at its international facilities, though it hasn’t tested anyone for the virus.

Levine declined to say how many Pennsylvania residents have been tested, nor would she say how many residents who have recently returned from affected countries are being monitored for symptoms.

She cited “significant privacy concerns.”

“We haven’t been divulging the exact number and location,” she said. “We’ve been monitoring (patients) according to CDC guidelines over the past month — there’s nothing new about that.”

Levine said the state has quarantine facilities available if they are needed, though she again declined to give details, saying the department has “resources if someone needs to be quarantined and monitored and they could not stay at home or their locations.”

Several UPMC employees have been living in voluntary quarantine after traveling to countries deemed to pose a risk, Snyder said.

“A small number of staff have been quarantined at home with appropriate compensation,” he said. “Everyone has been very cooperative, and nobody has developed illness.”

UPMC has suspended all business travel to China and Italy and continues to urge employees to avoid nonessential travel to China, Italy, South Korea, Japan and Iran.

Hospital officials could not yet estimate how long developing the UPMC coronavirus test will take, though efforts are underway in UPMC’s pathology labs.

Allegheny Health Network has sent one specimen to the state for testing so far, spokesman Daniel Laurent said.

AHN officials are “exploring the possibility of developing our own in-house test” but have not begun working on one yet, Laurent said. The AHN hospital system also is working with several lab vendors that are pursuing FDA approval for COVID-19 tests.

Like UPMC, a small number of AHN employees have self-quarantined in recent weeks after traveling to high-alert countries, Laurent said. All have since returned to work.