Stony Brook Southampton Hospital rose to the urgent and unique challenges of the novel coronavirus during the worst of the crisis. Now, it's ready to get back to some sense of normalcy as the East End reopens.
From an all-time-high population of 51 Covid-19 patients in the midst of the crisis -- 20 of them in the intensive care -- the hospital was down to 10 patients with the virus on Friday. Its current rate of admission is one patient a day, with a discharge of one person a day. "We should get to single digits this week," said Robert Chaloner, the chief administrative officer of the hospital.
Stony Brook Southampton has begun elective surgeries and routine testing procedures, such as mammograms and blood tests, at most of its locations, and Mr. Chaloner said the staff is eager to reopen the doors for more regular health care delivery.
"We are worried about people's health care," he said. "I've heard a number of stories of people not coming to the hospital when they should, with not great results."
Their concern is also financial. "We, like all local businesses, have suffered pretty greatly because of having to close a lot of what we do. It's had a dramatic impact on our financials." He said the months of March through May were very hard on the bottom line. "We'll figure out a way to get through it, but it will be difficult."
The hospital kept its emergency department open throughout the crisis and admitted patients for treatment of other life-threatening concerns. Mr. Chaloner said its record of protecting staff and patients was close to perfect, and not a single known case has emerged of a patient contracting Covid-19 while being treated there.
Dr. Howard Sklarek, a pulmonologist and I.C.U. doctor at the hospital, has continued to test negative for antibodies after months on the front lines of the illness. The personal protective equipment "and the precautions we're taking work," said Mr. Chaloner. "We know so much more than we did months ago about what works and what doesn't work."
Now, the hospital has begun opening its remote ambulatory surgery, radiology, and blood testing sites, working from the outside in toward the hospital itself. Places like the lab testing site at the East Hampton Health Care Center are not open yet, because they are small and need some additional work to be made safe to visit, but the site in Amagansett is. "It's in a phased and gradual way, little by little," like the rest of the county, he said. "We're not opening up anything until we're sure it's safe."
Patients will be required to make appointments, even for services previously offered on a walk-in basis, like lab work. Instead of a crowded waiting room, there will be special parking areas where patients can stay in their cars until it is time to be seen. Before receiving the appointment, they will be screened with a series of questions to determine whether they have been exposed to or are exhibiting signs of the virus.
Elective surgery patients will be tested for the virus three days before the procedure and it will be postponed if they test positive. "The first week we were open for elective surgery, we did end up canceling a couple for people who tested positive," he said.
Although fewer cases are emerging, Covid-19 is still active in our community, underlining why safety measures need to be taken. As of Friday, the hospital had admitted a total of 158 Covid-19 patients since it emerged here and had lost 17 to the virus. Tasked with increasing its capacity by 50 percent, it quickly increased its staffed patient beds from 94 to 184, and its I.C.U. beds from 7 to 21. Some people have told Mr. Chaloner they thought the total number of patients "was in the thousands, but we were never overwhelmed," he said. "We were very fortunate in that way."
The emergency room statistics are starting to resemble those of a more normal South Fork summer. At its height in April, Covid cases accounted for 70 percent of the emergency room visits. The weekend of May 30 was very busy, but only 10 percent of the cases were Covid-related. "Word is getting out that it is a very safe place with all of the protocols we have," Mr. Chaloner said.
His biggest worry is that people will become overconfident.
"It's not the patient who we know has Covid coming into the E.R. who is going to get people infected. It's the kid with the sprained ankle who nobody suspects" has the virus, where a staff member might relax the appropriate precautions. "We have to be scrupulous over the coming months."
People who were admitted to the hospital's I.C.U. "were very sick patients and they required a tremendous amount of resources. The people who want to poo-poo this disease, I wish they could see what it looks like to be a very sick Covid patient in an I.C.U. You wouldn't wish it on anyone."
Mr. Chaloner said he was comfortable with the pace of the reopening of Long Island's economy. "We're at a point where we are educated enough as a population that I think people know the right thing to do. . . . We know enough about this disease to stop its transmission and we have the methodologies in place to do it."
The communities here are taking the disease very seriously, he said. "I'm not seeing a lot of people with bravado saying they're trying to break the rules. People are trying to do the right thing."
He said his own theory on places that saw rises in patients after relaxing restrictions was that they were never as clamped down or as careful as we have been. "We'll have to watch it. We can't get cocky. Until we have a vaccine we'll just have to adjust the way we operate on a day-to-day basis."