Broome County plans more expansive COVID-19 testing after securing 4,000 tests

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Broome County Executive Jason Garnar announced on Monday that over the past few days the county has secured more than 4,000 coronavirus tests.

“That means our hospitals are going to be able to test more. That’s really important,” Garnar said at his daily COVD-19 press briefing, which on Monday was held in front of the headquarters of The Agency on the SUNY Broome campus in the town of Dickinson. “Our goal is to make sure that everyone who needs a test can get a test. That’s really important. We’re not completely there yet.”

Garnar and the county have been looking high and low for coronavirus tests over the last few weeks.

“You know we needed 6,000 weeks ago. We’ve got 4,000 on hand. I told people that I’ll go wherever I need to go to get the tests. I probably would sell my soul to get more tests. That’s incredibly important. Just a couple weeks ago we just had a few hundred [tests] on hand,” the county executive noted.

As of Monday afternoon, just 551 people in Broome County (a county with a population of about 200,000) had been tested for the coronavirus. Of those, 458 tested negative, 72 positive, and 21 test results were pending.

The county said 13 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized. Five county residents have died from disease, with the latest death occurring over the weekend.

Testing in the county is going to ramp up in the coming days.

“What Broome County can expect is that over the next few days, you’re going to see a large expansion of testing happening here,” Garnar said. “We’re already working with our local hospitals and our partners and the emergency operations center at the health department to move forward on that.”

Garnar said the Broome County Health Department spent about $16,000 for 3,000 tests, while the remainder came from the state and other sources.

“It’s very hard to procure these tests. People across the world are trying to buy them. We’re competing with thousands of other organizations to get tests,” he noted.

He said the county will keep trying to get more tests. “Look, we’re in the fight of our lives. It’s wartime right now. We will spare no expense in terms of being able to track down tests,” Garnar emphasized.

He said he would buy another 10,000-20,000 tests if he could acquire them. “We’ve got the money to do that.”

The county executive said the goal is to be able to set up a kind of drive-thru testing site, but the county will need to be able to ramp up the amount of tests it has to about 10,000 to 15,000 tests on hand.

As of Monday, Broome County had about 35 ICU beds and 55 ventilators available combined at its two hospitals — UHS Binghamton General Hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes Memorial Hospital, Garnar said.

He added that no hospital equipment had yet been diverted to downstate hospitals and no patients from downstate had been transferred up to the county as part of the state’s initiative to share hospital resources cross New York.

Photo credit: Jason Garnar Facebook page