Employees at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center spoke Tuesday about the lack of COVID-19 testing in the workplace following a fatal outbreak in the hospital’s emergency department.
At least 60 hospital staff have yielded positive results since the Christmas outbreak began, including one who died, Kaiser said Tuesday. Several emergency nurses told NBC Bay Area that they felt that if Kaiser had performed routine staff tests in the past few months, he could have prevented such a large outbreak.
“I think this could have been prevented or really minimized if the tests had been done before,” said one employee.
On Christmas Day, an employee dressed in an air-fed tree suit walked down the halls of the hospital’s emergency department. Kaiser said the suit was “probably” responsible for employees receiving COVID-19, including a registration officer who died on Sunday.
Some nurses said they felt the employee wearing the suit had become a scapegoat. They also said that before the outbreak they were not tested regularly.
Kaiser said before the outbreak that he followed the Santa Clara County order and added in a statement: “Even though the order stipulates that health care providers may require workers to wait up to 14 days between tests, we offer our health care workers to be tested weekly, if desired. “
Kaiser’s nurses said the hospital did not make it as easy for them as other hospitals do.
Since October, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, O’Connor Hospital and St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy tested employees who work directly with patients every two weeks. Required.
Juana Castillo, who works with Enterprise Employee Health at all three hospitals, said she was proactive and consistent with the test.
“We have a very low positivity rate based on asymptomatic testing of our employees,” she said.
Kaiser said he is testing all emergency department employees as part of his outbreak investigation.