05.18.20 COVID-19 Briefing Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
May 18, 2020
Live Stream - Live with the County of Santa Clara
10am PT

Sanjay Karani: Hi good morning everyone my name is Dr. Sanjay Karani. I'm the Hospital Medical Director at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

Today, I'll be talking about and sharing with the public how to access care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our hospitals and clinics here in the county are safe, open, and ready to serve the public.

I--we have removed our face coverings to make sure that we can properly communicate with our ASL interpreters.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Brian Saavedra, he's the Medical Director over at St. Louise Regional Hospital

Brian Saavedra: Great, thank you for having me.

SK: Brian, great to have you.

Just want to talk a little bit about what's been going on here in the county and how we're handling patient care during this time. In February and March, well we began to prepare for patients with COVID-19 and in March our hospitals and clinics began restricting access and postponing non-urgent
inpatient care. Our county and state began to shelter in place, and successfully, we're able to slow the impact of the disease on our healthcare system. As of right now, our confirmed cases is 2,435, our deaths are 135 and new deaths is zero. And this is as of yesterday on 5-17-2020.

We should be very proud of what we have done together because it has undoubtedly saved lives and given our hospitals time to prepare for a possible surge and since the number of hospitalized patients has come down significantly throughout the county, we're at the point where our hospitals are open for non-urgent surgeries and our clinics are open for primary care.

It's important to know that our hospitals, and clinics, our emergency department, our specialty centers, and urgent care clinics remain safe open and ready to serve the people who need our services. Brian, great to have you here and I have a few questions for you.

BS: Absolutely.

SK: For the Emergency Department, what are we doing to make sure that we're keeping our patients safe during this pandemic?

BS: Well first of all Sanjay, thanks for having me here.

You know the health and safety of our patients has always been our first priority, our top priority it has been and will continue to be so. You'll notice when you go to an emergency department. An emergency department, things by nature, of what's going on around us has changed, and it's changed to help provide safety measures for the patients and also the staff. We're all in this together as you mentioned.

The, but no doubt about it we're we're ready we have been ready for quite some time to take care of all emergencies, whether or not they're COVID-related or not COVID-related. Just because we're in a pandemic mode, doesn't mean that the hypertension, the diabetes, the car accidents, the broken bones,
the appendicitis, the heart attacks, the strokes go away. Those are still there and we're still able to safely take care of patients who have those conditions. So that's number one is we're open and ready and and can take care of you safely.

Some of the things you'll notice when you go to a clinic or an emergency department, I work in the Emergency Department so I can speak to that, is that you'll notice right away when you get there there it's a little bit different and necessarily so. You'll notice some social distancing measures like people are separated by about 6 feet we give people, if they don't have them already, facial coverings. That's very important to help control the spread and protect patients and staff.

We'll end up separating patients who do have COVID-type symptoms and flu-type symptoms for things that are not COVID-related, okay. And it's not to say that we bunch everybody up together we don't do that. Everybody who has COVID- or flu-like symptoms is placed in over an isolation area where we can treat them safely and treat them with proper PPE and keep them safe from each other, and the patients who don't have COVID symptoms we put in a different area and to help keep them very safe.

One of the things you'll notice is the rooms in the Emergency Department and many of the emergency departments that we go through, certainly at O'Connor and VMC and at St. Louise, is there now kind of separated quite a bit where they're isolated from each other and that's to help prevent droplets and
aerosols from spreading, protects the staff, more importantly it protects our patients, and like I said, we're all in this together, we have to protect each other.

Visitor restriction is a key component. As much as we want visitors to come and visit their family members, it's somewhat limited now and it's to prevent the spread of COVID-19. And so you'll notice some visitor restrictions. When people come into the hospital or clinic system, they'll automatically get a temperature check so you're greeted whether you're a doctor, or nurse, ancillary staff, or a patient, or a visitor, or a contractor dropping off supplies, you're gonna get a temperature check and a symptom check to see if you have any symptoms or so.

You'll notice that our people are walking around in the hospital required to have facial coverings. So people will have facial coverings in the hospital. That's to protect us and to protect you and so we
can protect each other.

Testing is one thing that I'm very proud of. Okay, testing all over the place that first took a while to ramp up, but over the last month and a half to two months, it's ramped up exponentially. Where we, if a patient comes to the Emergency Department and has significant COVID symptoms or requires the testing for other reasons, they can get that COVID test. Okay so I know I feel like I'm able to test people appropriately at this point and the turnaround time is actually pretty fantastic, right?

SK: Yeah.

BS: So the turnaround time has been somewhere between one to two hours for most patients. Sometimes it varies a little bit. But that's been key.

We are also able to test staff so physicians, nurses, ancillary staff, housekeepers, if they develop any symptoms whatsoever, they can get tested pretty much immediately or within a few hours or so and get some information very shortly on whether or not they are positive or negative for COVID and that helps us protect you guys and protect ourselves as well.

The like all these measures, all these actions were brought about because you, the population of Santa Clara County, the people of Santa Clara County did a great job as you mentioned with the Shelter-in-Place and Stay-at-Home orders.

Right, you gave the hospital system time to flatten out that curve so we can ramp up our safety measures, design protocols to help treat you. So we can absolutely treat you for emergency medical services, medical conditions in a very safe, efficient, compassionate manner. We're ready to take you in and take care of you. Please don't delay your health care. Come on in and see us and we'll take good care of you.

SK: Yeah we have very strict cleaning and sanitizing protocols as well.

BS: Correct.

SK: Along with continuing the facial coverings, there's a number of things I understand we're just going to continue doing during this period even as the COVID numbers kind of come down.

BS: Absolutely, and and to piggyback on that, I would tell tell people that on the news you've heard a lot about PPE or the lack thereof right and one of the concerns that people have is whether or not their doctors and nurses and ancillary staff are protected and I would tell you is that from the get-go, VMC has done a great job of providing the frontline service providers for aligned workers with proper masks, whether they're n95 masks or greater, the proper face shields, glasses, goggles, gowns, and we're able to treat patients safely and that allows us to keep ourselves healthy and to keep you guys healthy as well.

SK: I think one thing we want to stress also is those who have chronic medical diseases, chronic conditions, heart failure, diabetes, asthma, those who need to go even for the usual surveillance checks like mammograms and colonoscopies, We're ready for that too and we need to make sure our patients don't neglect that care by neglecting it like you said the small problem can become a bigger one, right?

BS: Absolutely. So that's very very important. The other medical condition still exists and they're still around us right. So a minor problem can become complex that a complex one can become severe and critical and we want people to come and see their doctor, to make appointments, to go see their primary care providers. If you've had an appointment, if you had a consultation coming up, you had a procedure that you delayed, there's really no good reason at this point to delay those. It's important that you take care of yourself and keep yourself as healthy as possible during during this crisis. The clinics, urgent cares, and emergency departments are designed, and have enacted measures, to help keep you safe. So please go in to see your doctors and make sure you get the care that you need.

SK: And we have some new technology out there, too, such as video visits, and you can use the My Health online patient portal to be able to access that and your doctor will help you decide whether an in-person visit is appropriate over versus a video visit is important.

I think one thing we also want to stress is I know during these difficult times, people may be losing
their insurance and and be afraid of the financial impact of visiting visiting a doctor could possibly be and we want to make it clear that we don't want insurance to be a barrier to their care. So one thing I want to mention to the public out there is please contact our Patient Access Department at and they can help you get the coverage you need.

Thank you Dr. Saavedra for joining me today.

BS: Absolutely.

For the latest information on COVID-19, please visit the county's website at www.SCCGOV.org/coronavirus

To learn more about our services, please visit www.SCVMC.org

And also know that at 1:30 there will be a press conference being held by the County here on Facebook Live.