Courtesy of Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital:
Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital (HHMH) working in conjunction with San Benito County Public Health, has been able to revise testing criteria for COVID-19 in order to better serve the community and enable more people to be tested.
If you have symptoms, (fever, cough, shortness of breath) or have come in contact with someone that has the virus, please call our hotline at (831) 636-2640 to be screened and receive further instructions.
“Now that the supply of test kits is more readily available and we are able to send the tests out to commercial labs, we have more ability to test” states Michael Bogey, MD, HHMH Chief of Emergency Medicine.
“We’ve always maintained that we wanted to test everyone possible for COVID-19, said Dr. Bogey. However, our hands have been tied by the CDC in that we have to adhere to their testing guidelines.” Early on the CDC developed specific criteria that had to be met for hospitals to test someone for COVID-19; especially due to the limited availability of test kits and the capacity for labs to be able to run them.
Dr. Bogey goes on to say “We do believe that more extensive testing for COVID-19 would help the community as a whole in order to get real numbers of those infected and help decrease community spread.”
