Coronavirus Testing And Hospital Bed Availability

Hospitals are working hard to free up the number of hospital beds during the coronavirus outbreak.

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Hospitals are working hard to free up the number of hospital beds available to potential coronavirus patients.

Waay 31's sydney martin is live outside huntsville hospital tonight where she learned some patients there are now being taken to a local lab to be tested.

Huntsville hospital ceo david spillers said today a lab at hudson alpha has started to test patients...and can get results back in a matter of hours.

Alabama departmetnt of public health doctor karen landers told me those private labs are required to report any positive case to the state spillers said now being able to test some patients here locally has allowed them to quickly determine if patients have coronavirus... since before they were waiting days just to find out if someone was positive or negative.

He explained this will take some strain off resources.

However, he said only cases that are taking up a lot of resources or are of the highest priority are being sent to the private lab because they don't want to overwhelm the lab.

David spillers, "we've got 48 patients in our emergency departments that is all of our hospitals across north alabama that's not just huntsville main.

We've got 39 inpatients in all of our hospitals that we are waiting on test results.

Yesteday system wide we sent 93 tests to the state to be tested we sent additional tests locally to be tested."

Right now, spillers said there are still nearly 400 beds available in the huntsville hospital system.

And that's with more than one thousand total paitents being treated for a variety of illnesses or injuries.

Right now the hopsital says its working on getting more personal protective equipment for it's staff and said it has about half of it's respirators in use.

And as of this afternoon- all elective surgeries at hospitals in alabama have been canceled.

Live in huntsville sm waay 31 news.