Preliminary report of drive-through screening COVID-19 screening process in a large suburban community

摘要

The 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was first identified in Wuhan China in early December, 2019, and named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 12, 2020. The first US COVID-19 case was identified in an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, WA [1–3]. On March 10, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic due to COVID-19 [4]. Patients with COVID-19 symptoms rapidly started to appear in US hospital emergency departments (ED), and these departments needed to quickly develop strategies to respond to this sudden influx of acutely ill and worried well patients. At the University of California-San Diego, two EDs tested for COVID-19 and reported their results during the first 10 days of screening in March, 2020. High-risk patients, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control (fever, cough, shortness of breath and travel to an endemic area, healthcare worker with exposure), were offered screening. Of the 283 tests ordered, 10% were COVID-19 positive [5].