PERRY COUNTY, Mo. — At Perry County Memorial Hospital, 80 miles south of St. Louis, the official motto is "People Care More Here."
The hospital has just 25 beds and serves a rural community that would have to travel a long way to get to any other hospital.
But three people who work at the hospital are questioning the motto. They tell the I-Team that the two doctors infected with COVID-19 treated patients in their emergency room.
The sources said that one ER doctor felt ill on Sunday but continued to treat patients all day. The doctor called in sick on Monday and later tested positive for the coronavirus.
Another doctor reportedly tested positive later in the week and was told to stay on duty and continue to see patients.
"Our emergency room is a one-physician emergency, and that's pretty standard across critical access hospitals. So we don't have two or three ER physicians, where we can just let someone leave. We can't do that. So, as soon as possible, this physician was relieved of her duties and quarantined," said Chris Wibbenmeyer, Perry County Memorial Hospital's administrator.
According to the same sources who brought this issue to 5 On Your Side, the second physician to test positive is being asked to work again this weekend.
Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control recommend that healthcare providers who test positive for COVID-19 be excluded from work for at least 10 days after their first positive test, even if they never develop symptoms.
The hospital's ER is managed by Emergency Medical Care, LLC. The contractor in Chesterfield, hires and pays the ER staff.
"And so they have a pool of physicians where that they can draw upon in a situation like this," said Wibbenmeyer.
Hospital administrators told the I-Team that seven of their health care workers have tested positive for COVID-19. They add that anyone who came in contact with these workers was informed in a timely manner.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, Perry County in Missouri is one of the top 10 counties in the state for COVID-19 cases per resident. There are almost 19,000 residents in the county, which has reported 163 confirmed cases of the coronavirus so far.
Dr. Matthew Gaeta, the medical director at PCMH, told the I-Team, "For the better part of the past four weeks [we] have seen a decent uptick in our number of positive cases."
When the I-Team reached out to the Perry County Health Department with questions about contact tracing for cases of COVID-19 among care providers, a representative from the department said the director was too busy to talk to a reporter.
A worker in the department told the I-Team's PJ Randhawa that hospitals have their own policies and procedures for responding to a care provider diagnosed with COVID-19 because hospital staff are considered essential workers.
CDC guidelines state that a health care provider who has tested positive for COVID-19 but doesn't show symptoms yet may be allowed to keep working in the event of a critical staffing shortage.
Dr. Hilary Babcock, an infectious disease specialist with Barnes Jewish Hospital, told 5 On Your Side's Mike Bush that there's no standard for testing doctors for COVID-19 on a regular basis.
She added, if a test did come back positive, "the doctor should leave work right away."
Administrators at PCMH told the I-Team that their circumstances aren't so cut and dry, but they insist that every patient that comes into their ER is as safe as possible.
"We have taken extra steps to make sure not only our staff are safe, but our physicians are safe, our facility is clean, any patient or visitor walking in will see that right away. So we are extremely confident," said Wibbenmeyer.
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