Cars line up for a drive-thru coronavirus screening at Yeungnam University Medical Center in Daegu, South Korea, in this Feb. 27, 2020, file photo. - Photo by Yonhap via AP / Kim Hyun-tai

A Little Rock coronavirus task force established by the mayor will tentatively move ahead with a plan to use the Southwest campus of Baptist Health as a centralized drive-thru screening and operations center to manage the city's response to the viral outbreak.

Members of Mayor Frank Scott Jr.'s task force who met Sunday discussed streamlining the city's response to individuals concerned that they may have contracted the virus by using the Southwest campus location to screen, advise and potentially test residents for covid-19.

The idea is to relieve the load at the main hospital sites where people are receiving care, according to the mayor's office.

"The testing involves a swab, and everyone may not need to be swabbed," mayoral spokeswoman Stephanie Jackson told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday after the meeting.

The city is already directing members of the public to contact the Arkansas Department of Health by phone or visit the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences website to determine whether they need to be tested or see a doctor, Jackson said.

It's possible that the screening site at the Southwest campus could serve as another treatment center depending on the number of hospital beds available elsewhere, Jackson said.

Nevertheless, she emphasized that the task force's response is still in the planning stage.

If citizens are sick enough that personnel at the campus believe they should receive treatment, they will be directed to a hospital that has the appropriate resources such as ventilators, the task force's chairman, Dr. Dean Kumpuris, said at the meeting Sunday.

Ideally, this will avoid the problem of having to transfer patients arriving at an underequipped hospital later on, he said.

If the situation worsens, the Southwest location may evolve into a triage mode, Kumpuris said, with personnel instructing visitors who think they're sick enough -- or if a medical professional believes they're sick enough -- to go to a certain treatment facility with "the greatest capacity to take care of you if you're sick."

Kumpuris, a gastroenterologist who also serves as an at-large member of Little Rock's Board of Directors, said evaluating people who show up will likely require personnel with training in medicine or phlebotomy.

He described the proposal as "the simplest way I think we can do it."

The Southwest campus of Baptist Health located near Interstate 30 and Mabelvale West Road currently offers behavioral health services, according to the hospital's website.

The next step, according to Jackson, is to evaluate the number of public health personnel from local hospitals and contractors who can be expected to contribute to this proposed triage and screening center.

Jackson said the mayor's task force will meet for the third time today at 2 p.m. in City Hall to iron out more details of the plan and assess the number of personnel available from regional medical providers. Health care providers involved in the covid-19 planning discussion include Baptist Health, UAMS, CARTI, Arkansas Heart Hospital, Arkansas Children's Hospital, Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, CHI St. Vincent, and the Arkansas VA.

Separately, task force members are working to establish a simple, standardized screening questionnaire to be used by all hospitals, as well as MEMS and the proposed Southwest campus center.

UAMS currently offers an online screening tool for coronavirus through its website. And as of Thursday, UAMS has established a drive-thru screening clinic at Shuffield and Jack Stephens drives open daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. where individuals can have their temperature taken.

However, at the moment, the Arkansas Department of Health has the capacity to test only 20 people per day for covid-19.

That number is expected to rise once UAMS gets access to machines needed to more than quintuple the number of daily tests and receive results in as little as six hours, as opposed to waiting for over 100 hours for results from a reference lab, according to Dr. Stephen Mette, UAMS senior vice chancellor and the CEO of UAMS Medical Center.

The equipment will hopefully be up and running within 10 days or so, Mette said at the task force's meeting.

"The lion's share of resources" will be taken up by those uncertain cases who may or may not have covid-19, which is impossible to know unless they can be tested, Mette said. "And that's where the lack of testing is really hurting us," Mette said.

Right now, UAMS Medical Center has 10 patients, only one of whom is confirmed to have covid-19, Mette said, but all of them are being treated as if they have contracted the virus. "That's the resource problem and uncertainty that is going to undo us all," Mette said.

A UAMS spokeswoman, Leslie Taylor, told the Democrat-Gazette via email Sunday evening that the drive-thru clinic has screened a total of 213 patients. The UAMS online tool has screened 685 people and a phone hotline has fielded 470 calls, she added.

After their temperature is taken, individuals who visit the drive-through clinic are referred for covid-19 testing if necessary. Those with serious symptoms are sent to the UAMS emergency department, Taylor said.

Scott established the task force Tuesday. He issued a preemptive state of emergency declaration one day after Arkansas on Wednesday confirmed its first presumptive case of covid-19, the disease by the virus. Since then, cases of covid-19 in the state have risen from 12 to 16 as of Sunday, according to the Arkansas Department of Health.

Symptoms of the respiratory illness, which is thought to be most dangerous for older adults and individuals with chronic health conditions, include coughing, fever and shortness of breath.

At the meeting, members of the task force spoke about the need to prepare now for expected growth in the number of covid-19 patients in Arkansas.

Dr. Amanda Novack, an infectious disease specialist with Baptist Health, said, "We are already behind. The world is already behind."

She referred to the explosive growth in the number of coronavirus cases which occurred in two hotspots: China, where the disease originated, and Italy, where authorities have struggled to get the outbreak under control. "I think that this testing center is absolutely a great idea. We have to hurry up with that," she said.

Additionally, task force members need to think bigger and explore ideas such as opening the shuttered North Metro Medical Center in Jacksonville, Novack said, "or other things that are going to seem very dramatic."

"But it's already time to be doing things that seem dramatic," Novack added.

Metro on 03/16/2020