MAINE, USA — MaineHealth, the state’s largest health care system, changed its coronavirus policy late last week, no longer requiring staff to test negative before returning to work after a COVID-19 quarantine.
Chief Government Affairs Officer Katie Fullam Harris announced the decision during a virtual meeting on Friday with members of the Maine Department of Health & Human Services.
"The testing is very good at diagnosing COVID. It is not very good at identifying if someone is still able to transmit COVID," she explained.
She said the staff has been "frustrated" after feeling fully recovered from a COVID infection, yet being kept home by a policy that required a negative antigen test before they could resume work. At the same time, Fullam said her hospitals continued to battle staffing challenges.
A spokesperson for MaineHealth confirmed Monday its hospitals remained in “contingency” status, meaning resources were stressed but not at a crisis level. Hospitals report their status to DHHS in one of three tiers pertaining to resource load and staffing capability: conventional, contingency, and crisis. Testing to return to work is not requested by state or federal health officials for facilities claiming contingency or crisis status. A MaineHealth press release on Thursday said science, as well as a short supply of tests, led to the decision.
Maine’s second-largest healthcare system, Northern Light Health, was also in contingency status Monday, but a spokesperson told NEWS CENTER Maine its testing requirement would remain in place.
Last week, the Biden administration announced it was buying 500 million more tests to distribute to Americans. Dr. Tom Inglesby, the White House’s COVID testing coordinator, spoke with NEWS CENTER Maine reporter Chris Costa on Friday.
"We’re using all the levers we have to try to increase the size of the market," Inglesby said. "There are lots of different modalities for testing. Over-the-counter tests are a really important part of that, but they’re not the only way to test. We have laboratory testing, point-of-care testing, and we’re gonna keep promoting all of those channels as well."
As individual hospitals make their own decisions within federal guidance, Dr. Lori Banks with Bates College spoke with us Monday, saying testing requirements were initially part of the CDC’s plan but health leaders realized it wasn’t a reality.
"Access is an issue right now," Banks said about COVID tests. "And, so, it just wasn’t feasible to include. Again, in a perfect world, if everybody had unlimited testing available they’d be able to include that, but we don’t. That’s the hard part."
In lieu of a perfect world, Banks and Maine's hospital leaders continued hoping for a more vaccinated one, so hospital workers and their leaders no longer make decisions based on a contingency or a crisis.