Financially strained and low on supplies, clinics and health centers worry a coronavirus surge could potentially force them to close their doors.
“Even if half of Californians end up with the coronavirus, if it’s spread out over six months, then it’s more likely there will be appointments and walk-in clinics and ventilators at hospitals to treat everybody who is at that level of need,” said Steven Wallace, a professor in the community health sciences department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “If it all happens in six weeks, then the lines at the clinics will look like the lines out of Costco.
“The normal routine of a community health center is very different than what they’re being asked to do right now,” Wallace said. “They’re set up for primary care, they’re set up for a child coming in with an earache or an adult coming in for diabetes. They’re not set up for a contagious pandemic.”In Los Angeles County, more than 350 community clinics and health centers provide primary care and preventive services to 1.
She said some facilities have to turn to private sellers such as Amazon to obtain supplies, spending more than what they normally would. And with a small stock of test kits, doctors reserve testing based on the criteria set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But that means they have seen a significant drop in the numbers of visits they have per day and that then connects us to a revenue problem, which is that clinics get paid by the visits,” she said. “If you’re not providing visits, you’re not getting paid and how do you pay your staff?”
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