Progressive Health of Delaware Update on COVID-19
Progressive Health of Delaware has been monitoring the COVID-19 situation very closely. Our patients’ health is our top priority! As a primary care office, our primary responsibility is to act in the best interest of our patients, our staff, and the community at large. Please know that all decisions are being made with great care. We know that situations like this can bring lots of questions and uncertainties and we hope to answer many of your questions below.
Our providers joined a conference call with the Delaware Division of Public Health this week. From this meeting, we were advised to encourage any patient with symptoms of COVID-19 to stay home and not come into the office, as to limit the spread of this illness to other patients and our staff. We have summarized answers to many of your questions below. We hope this helps in navigating this difficult situation.
Symptoms of COVID-19 are fever over 100 degrees, cough, and shortness of breath. Symptoms can range from mild to severe. The risk of serious complications from this illness is mostly for our older adults as shown on the graph below.
If you are under 50 with minimal health problems, it is less likely that you will have any serious or lasting effects from Coronavirus. It is imperative that you stay home and not come into contact with older adults. If you are an older adult, please call or office to get advice on your illness.
There is no treatment for COVID-19. It is recommended to rest and stay well hydrated. You should isolate yourself in a room with preferably your own bathroom and limit contact with any other family members. Please call our office if you are having any more worrisome symptoms or concerns. Here’s a great article from NPR with lots of helpful tips (Biggest one we got was, “Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.”)
You are contagious until you have had no fever for 72 hours and symptoms are improving.
If you feel your loved one needs to go to the emergency room (ER), it is best to call our office. We may ask that you notify the ER so they can be prepared to receive the suspected patient. If calling 911, please let them know they are exhibiting symptoms of the illness so EMS can come prepared with proper protection.
DE Division of Public Health (DPH) has a very limited amount of tests for COVID-19. This is currently a very limited resource. They request only to have patients tested if they have shortness of breath, fever, and cough, and are high risk (older adults, chronic medical problems, immuno-compromise, close link to someone with confirmed COVID-19, or travel to a high risk area). Otherwise they do not recommend testing at this time. If you meet the above requirements, the number to call DPH is 1-866-408-1899. Again, please only call if you meet these criteria, so that their staff is able to respond to our community that is most at risk.
Test kits at Labcorp/Quest- Results take 24-48 hours to get back at Quest. Labcorp takes 2-3 days.
The DE Division of Health recommends we only test patients that work in healthcare, or are high risk patients. Again, this is a limited resource. The high priority would be at risk patients. The specimen would need to be collected at our office and sent to their facility. This presents a problem as we want to avoid bringing patients into the office with COVID-19. If you are a high risk patient or work in the healthcare field, please call the office to let us know about your symptoms and determine if you should be tested for COVID-19.
COVID-19 travel
It is recommended that high risk patients not travel. This would be older adults (70’s and older), immuno-compromised patients, chronic health conditions (diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, etc). It is recommended to avoid travel to countries with high numbers of infected individuals (China, Iran, Italy- this is constantly updating though). If you do plan to travel, I would recommend frequent hand washing and sanitizing.
Here is the CDC website with travel recommendations
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/faqs.html
Telehealth Visits
Medicare recently approved Telehealth visits to avoid high risk patients from coming into the office. Our office has implemented this starting this week due to the COVID-19. If you are high risk and worried about coming in, please call the office (or use your patient portal) to see if your visit can be done at home instead. You will need access to a computer with a camera and a microphone. We are using Google Hangouts Meet for this purpose. If you have commercial insurance, please call your carrier to see if telehealth visits would be covered.