People who may be infected with the novel coronavirus can be tested at a drive-up cabana set up Friday at Scripps Health in La Jolla, while a tent set up outside an emergency room in Encinitas is performing triage on patients showing symptoms of COVID-19.

Scripps Health also has established a dedicated phone line, (888) 261-8431, for people to call to speak with nurses if they suspect they may be infected. People are asked to call the number before going to any Scripps facility, and only people referred by the nurses can receive the drive-up testing.

The phone line is open 7 a.m. - 9 p.m. weekdays and 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. on weekends.

The hospital had received 233 phone calls from people with concerns about the virus and had seen 15 people at what’s called the “COVID Cabana” as of noon Friday, said Dr. Ghazala Sharieff, Scripps chief medical officer, clinical excellence and experience.


Once referred to the cabana, a patient will park under an awning in the hospital parking lot, and medical staff members wearing protective gear will wheel out a kit to take a nasal or oral swap.

Cabanas also are scheduled to open Tuesday at Scripps Clinic Rancho Bernardo and Scripps Coastal Medical Center Vista.

A tent was set up Friday outside the emergency room of Scripps Memorial Hospital, Encinitas, and others are expected to open next week at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista, Hillcrest and La Jolla.

Scripps Health CEO Chris Van Gorder said the tests will take just a few minutes, and patients will receive a call with the results in about 48 hours.


The approach tackles a quandary healthcare professionals have faced in dealing with the virus: How to treat patients who may be infected without risking infecting others in their facilities?

“This prevents someone who is sick from making other people who are sitting in a waiting room sick, and it protects our staff,” Van Gorder said.

San Diego County health officials this week have urged people to not show up at medical facilities if they suspect they may infected, but to call first to allow staff members to take precautionary steps.

Van Gorder said Scripps Health has preparing for the outbreak since first hearing about it when it was in China. The drive-up testing is similar to drive-up flu vaccines the hospital has offered in the past, he said.


The Scripps testing cabana is the first in the region that is part of a new strategy unfolding across the county.

Public health officials said Thursday that they are working with many health systems to create separate spaces, physically disconnected from the places that patients go, where suspected COVID-19 patients can go to give samples without having them come into contact with any other patients.

For weeks, the only people who could get tested were those who met U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention screening criteria which required not just symptoms like cough and fever but also recent travel history or contact with someone who tested positive.

But hospital labs and commercial labs are now free to test whoever they want.


That’s key, said Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley, an infectious disease specialist and senior director of international initiatives at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Testing only those with known risk, he said, makes it very difficult to gauge how much transmission is occurring in the community.

“What we need to do right now is much less directed testing so that we can truly begin to understand how much transmission we actually have going on in the community outside those whose risk we already understand,” Schooley said.

Vastly increasing the sheer volume of tests performed, and testing everybody, he added, is the only way to build up enough points on epidemiological maps to reveal the true pattern of this outbreak. For the last few weeks, he noted, the epidemiological community’s view of how quickly transmission is occurring in the community has been murky due to a sheer lack of data.


“Once we are able to see better where the puck has been, we’ll be more able to confidently predict where it’s headed,” Schooley said.

