7 COVID-19 patients dead, 100 admitted at Lexington Medical since SC outbreak began

Lexington Medical Center has treated at least 100 COVID-19 patients — seven of whom died — since early March, a top hospital administrator said on Monday.

All seven patients who died of respiratory illness caused by the COVID-19 virus were older adults, Lexington Medical Center CEO Tod Augsburger said in an exclusive interview with The State. Two of the seven lived in the hospital’s nursing home, Lexington Medical Center Extended Care.

The youngest was a 70-year-old nursing home resident who had other health problems, according to Augsburger, and the hospital’s oldest patient to die of the illness was 101 years old.

Lexington Medical Center, one of the largest employers and health care providers in the Midlands, has diagnosed 313 COVID-19 patients since March 7, Augsburger said. That Saturday, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control confirmed the hospital’s first case of the virus: a Kershaw County man who had arrived at Columbia Metropolitan Airport on an airplane, feeling sick, Augsburger said. The man went directly to Lexington Medical Center, where he tested positive for COVID-19 and was treated in the emergency department.

The following week, on March 13, the first Extended Care patient tested positive for the virus, according to Augsburger. He said the hospital immediately began tracking down employees who might have been exposed to the virus. Extended Care is the largest nursing home in the Carolinas, with some 370 residents and 450 employees, according to Augsburger.

Eleven nursing home employees had tested positive for COVID-19 as of April 27, and eight had returned to work, the hospital CEO said. Another 19 Lexington Medical Center employees at the main hospital or physician’s practices have tested positive for the virus, he said. Of the 30 total confirmed cases, 21 employees have recovered and returned to work, according to Augsburger. None of the infected employees worked in the emergency room, he said.

Given how widespread the outbreak has become — impacting every county in South Carolina and every state in the nation — Augsburger said it’s often unclear how employees became ill in the first place.

“You no longer can tell if this employee will get this because they’re caring for a patient or if this employee will get this because they went to Target. Or somebody in their family had it,” he said. “There’s no way to know anymore.”

He said he expects the number of cases in the Lexington Medical Center employee population, like in the general population, to increase as the state moves to reopen its economy and resume public life.

While it appears the number of new positive cases has “leveled off” at the hospital’s testing sites — to about 10 positives per day out of 100 daily tests — Augsburger said those numbers only represent a portion of symptomatic patients.

“If you look at the trend line, it’s leveling,” he said. “The social distancing seems to be working, and we’re seeing it slow, but I can’t point to a dramatic decline yet. And, as people get back together, which is expected, then I anticipate we’ll see those numbers continue to rise.”

Cases of the virus in South Carolina have kept increasing, despite some models that indicate the state might be past its COVID-19 peak. At least 5,613 people in South Carolina have tested positive for the virus, and 177 have died as of Tuesday morning, according to state health officials.

The number of coronavirus cases in South Carolina is likely much higher than what’s being reported, health officials say. On Monday, DHEC said it projects 40,000 cases throughout the state.

About a third of the patients Lexington Medical Center has diagnosed with the virus have been admitted to the hospital for treatment, but most had recovered and gone home, Augsburger said. About 20 COVID-19 patients were still hospitalized on the morning of April 27, including seven in the critical care unit and three who were on ventilators, he said.

Health officials have advised states to reach a 14-day downward trend in new COVID-19 cases before reopening their economies. Federal epidemiologists have also recommended a massive increase in testing and more thorough “contact-tracing” to closely track the outbreak. Most states, including South Carolina, have not met these goals but are moving forward on plans to restart their economies.

Last week, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster tasked state leaders with making a plan to gradually reopen South Carolina, which will likely need a federal loan to meet its financial obligations as jobless claims continue to pile up.

Augsburger is looking for information from public health researchers, who still don’t know how widespread COVID-19 is in asymptomatic populations, he said. Lexington Medical Center doesn’t have sufficient resources to test asymptomatic patients for the virus but new findings could change guidance coming from state health officials, he said.

It’s been just shy of eight weeks since Lexington Medical Center began treating COVID-19 patients, and about two weeks since the hospital first received resources it needs to conduct on-site testing. Prior to mid-April, the hospital sent its samples to DHEC or national labs for testing. In total, the hospital system has tested around 3,050 people for the COVID-19 virus, Augsburger said.

With national labs, such as Quest and LabCorp, patients were waiting seven to 10 days for results early on, he said. Now, Lexington Medical Center can get same-day results from its own lab and quickly segment and treat symptomatic patients coming in to the emergency department.

“That’s helped, but we dramatically, desperately need more testing capabilities in this state and at the hospitals,” Augsburger said.

Lexington Medical Center had fewer than 300 of those on-site test kits on hand as of April 27 and was awaiting a shipment of chemical reagents needed to process patient samples, he said.

The hospital broadened its community testing last week by adding a “physician-directed” testing site at Lexington Family Practice Summit in northeast Columbia. That brings the total number of testing sites to three, including the hospital’s emergency room and a drive-thru site in Saluda Pointe, Augsburger said. The hospital is still only testing symptomatic patients, and drive-thru patients need to be referred by a physician.

Lexington Medical Center also signed an agreement in recent days with Fort Jackson and local Army health care providers to conduct COVID-19 testing in exchange for expedited shipments of the necessary testing chemicals, according to Augsburger.

“We have a lot of irons in the fire,” he said.