More than 1,000 Henrico employees tested, only one positive for COVID-19

(UPDATE: April 29, 12:10 P.M. – Through April 27, Henrico officials now report a total of 879 front-line employees have been tested at the Virginia Center Commons drive-through site, and three have tested positive for COVID-19 initially, though on follow-up tests, two of those tested negative. Sixteen people have tested positive for early antibodies and four for late antibodies.)

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Henrico County officials are breathing sighs of relief, after COVID-19 testing on more than 1,000 of the county’s front-line workers returned only one positive result.

Henrico Deputy County Manager for Public Safety Anthony McDowell informed the Board of Supervisors of the news during its meeting Tuesday night.

“We can say fairly conclusively that we do not have a large number of infected employees working on the front line, which also means that they are not asymptomatic carriers of the virus,” McDowell said.

The majority of those tests – 630 – have been conducted since April 22 at Virginia Center Commons Mall. That’s where the county established drive-through testing for all of its public safety employees and other frontline workers, including those from the school system, as part of a 14-day contract with Pennsylvania-based Dentrust Optimized Care Solutions.

Those who visit that site also are being tested for antibodies to the virus, whose presence would indicate whether they already had (perhaps unknowingly) contracted it. Only 11 of those tested to date showed early antibodies and just two showed later antibodies, McDowell said. (One person who tested positive for both early and late antibodies already was known to have had the virus and has recovered, he said.)

That so many Henrico officials who have been actively working in the community and in contact with a variety of people daily have avoided the virus entirely is welcome news, McDowell said, and shows that taking precautions and using personal protective equipment, or PPE, has worked.

Henrico is the only locality in the region and possibly the state that is conducting ongoing, widespread testing of its employees, McDowell said.

“We may be the only locality in the nation – certainly the only one that I’ve heard of – that’s providing access to testing not only for our first-responders but also to their spouses and their partners,” he added.

The county has invited all other localities in the region and a number of local organizations and companies to have their front-line workers tested at Virginia Center Commons, too, he said. So far, several other entities have elected to do so, including GRTC, Powhatan County, the chief medical examiner’s office and Lake Monticello Fire and Rescue, among others. Others may join that list in the coming days, McDowell said.

Henrico is spending a little more than $33,500 per day for the 14-day deployment (a total of about $470,000 overall), but will be seeking reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Authority and the other participating localities and organizations, according to its Emergency Operations Manager Jackson Baynard. Most of the 40 workers who are staffing the testing site are local residents, he said.

'What do you wish you had done?'
Baynard credited officials in other jurisdictions in New York and Washington state with helping to provide Henrico something of a road map for handling the outbreak.

“We asked them ‘What are you doing? What do you wish you had done?” he said.

Several responded that they would have liked to test a lot of people quickly and establish an early supply chain with a vendor to acquire PPE.

Dentrust performs mobile health care services for the U.S. National Guard and came recommended, Baynard said.

He’s hopeful that businesses in the private sector and other localities in the state might soon deploy similar testing opportunities – “which would be awesome,” he said.

County employees who test negative but then feel the need to be tested again probably would be permitted to do so, Baynard said, if they were demonstrating symptoms of the virus.

One of the concerns some county officials had when plans for the ongoing testing site formed was what would happen if results showed a significant number of employees had the virus, McDowell said. That was a fear they also heard from officials in other localities nationwide with whom they consulted before launching the site.

The county is reporting its testing results to the Virginia Department of Health, but it’s how many of them have so far been recorded in the daily updates provided by the department.

Tuesday’s numbers showed that a total of 2,910 tests had been conducted in Henrico to date, with 835 positive cases (or about 29 percent of all the county’s test results), 95 deaths and 120 hospitalizations. All but two of the deaths occurred in people age 60 or older, and most have occurred among residents of nursing homes.

McDowell praised the efforts of Henrico citizens, saying that only a few weeks ago, the region was bracing for the possibility of hospitals being overwhelmed and grocery stores out of supplies.

“Fortunately Henrico County and Henrico residents have done what was necessary to flatten the curve and to avoid those types of fears and predictions from becoming our reality to this point,” he said.