Butler Health System's reported inpatient figures decreased drastically over the weekend.

On Monday, BHS reported only one patient with a confirmed case of COVID-19 being treated in Butler Memorial Hospital's intensive care unit.

The hospital on Friday reported having seven inpatients with either suspected or confirmed cases of the virus, with one of those patients being treated in the intensive care unit.

BHS Dr. John Love, who specializes in infectious diseases, said Friday's inpatient numbers were weighted by suspected cases of COVID-19.

“It's just a snapshot of time, and we just happened to have a bunch of admissions with symptoms that could be COVID-19,” Love said.

BHS tests all admitted patients for COVID-19, with or without symptoms, but it will prioritize, isolate and begin COVID-19 protocols for patients whose symptoms align with the virus.

Love said common illnesses with similar symptoms look like bacterial infections, pneumonia or other illnesses associated with shortness of breath. Once they are identified as not having COVID-19, they are removed from the numbers and begin receiving treatment or further testing.

He said when the dust settles each day, the hospital usually has between one and three inpatients who have COVID-19. He said he also expects that average to fluctuate at times, but to remain largely the same moving forward.

“That's customary for us,” Love said. “They're just part of the mix now, and this is what I and most people in the field foresee for the foreseeable future.”

BHS's decrease Monday coincided with a sharp decline in new cases and deaths at the state and county levels.The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported no deaths Monday and only 384 new cases, a decrease from Sunday's report of 829 new cases and 36 new deaths statewide.Butler County accounted for two new confirmed cases in Monday's state report. Since the pandemic began, 664 county residents have tested positive for COVID-19 and 17 residents have died due to complications from the virus.Love said BHS includes suspected cases in its reporting because it's a part of the identification process. He said the goal is to not let any cases of COVID-19 into the hospital unnoticed, and that taking precautions with patients suspected of having the virus is the safest approach.“We try to be really tight in the front and then loosen things up,” he said.Love said even with the seven suspected cases on Friday, the hospital was not in danger of being overwhelmed. He said all of the patients were treated on the same floor.In recent weeks, Butler Memorial removed some of the alterations made in anticipation of waves of COVID-19 with plans to reinstate them if the need arises.One example is the surgical recovery room that has returned to its original purpose after serving briefly as COVID-19 overflow beds.“We didn't need the capacity,” Love said. “We are back to usual Butler Memorial Hospital capacities.”

While there is optimism about the hospital's capacity in space, Love said he still has concerns about testing, despite recent claims that commercial national labs have been decreasing their wait times.At their peak, people whose tests were sent to national labs waited as long as two weeks. Love said an average result time now for Quest Diagnostic, which has a regional lab in Pittsburgh, is about three days.He said three days is still a long time for people to wait to know whether they need to begin COVID-19 protocols, and the Department of Health's contact tracers don't begin their function until a positive test is acquired.“It's still not ideal,” Love said. “It's just lost time.”Also Monday, state Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine announced further expansion of the contact tracing program. There are currently 1,205 contact tracing staff working with local and county health entities to respond to COVID-19 cases.“By hiring more contact tracing staff, we will strengthen and diversify our public health and contact tracing workforce,” said Levine in a news release Monday. “We are working to carefully hire staff to help with immediate contact tracing needs and will hire more staff as needed.”

But a person needs to test positive before contact tracers can do their job, and Gov. Tom Wolf has promised to expand the state's testing capacity.Love said to correct the situation at the national labs, producers of the testing reagents have allocated their products to the bigger labs; meanwhile, BHS has been waiting months to purchase enough reagents to serve the region's testing needs.Love said the equipment BHS has in its own lab can produce a COVID-19 test result in as little as three to four hours, and the process runs continuously without the need for batches that can slow down results.He estimated the Butler lab could produce around 1,000 tests per day if it had the reagents to do so.“This is basically creating an artificial bottleneck by putting testing materials in a small set of hands,” Love said. “We feel pretty confident that we could put a big dent into this.”Love said BHS has plans to tell state officials it can handle the region's testing, but in the meantime people should continue to follow social distancing and other COVID-19 mitigation measures, including wearing masks.“Wearing masks is really the best thing we can do as a community right now,” Love said. “It's not going to cure every problem. It's not going to prevent every infection. But it's a relatively low inconvenience for the health of the community.”