MOSES LAKE — Samaritan Hospital officials are looking for — but not finding, at least not yet — additional ventilation machines and adapting more hospital rooms to accommodate possible patients with respiratory illnesses. Hospital officials updated commissioners on the response to the COVID-19 outbreak during a special meeting Friday.

Director of nursing Jan Sternberg said the hospital will start screening all people, including staff, before they enter the hospital, beginning today.

“That’s a temperature check, just to ensure they do not have a fever, and also we’re asking them several questions to make sure they don’t have any respiratory or flu-like symptoms,” Sternberg said.

A tent is being installed outside the emergency room with the intention of screening patients coming to the ER. That screening is scheduled to start Wednesday, Sternberg said.

Hospital officials added “negative pressure” rooms to the intensive care unit and its medical-surgical unit, Sternberg said. A negative pressure room allows air to flow in, but not back out, decreasing the possibility of contamination.

“We are seeing more critical patients,” Sternberg said. “We are seeing more people come in with respiratory-type issues that need a higher level of care.” Samaritan has the ability to provide the necessary level of care, she said.

Two negative-pressure rooms will be available in the ICU and 10 more in the medical-surgical unit.

Currently, the hospital has four ventilators, Sternberg said. A ventilator can have more than one patient on it, if necessary. Part of the hospital’s plan would be to put two patients with the same disease on one ventilator, if circumstances required.

The hospital has eight other machines designed to help people breathe that can be adapted as ventilators, Sternberg said. There’s also one normally used when patients must be transported. Hospital officials are looking for and asking for more ventilators and other machines, she said, but haven’t found any.

Chief Executive Officer Theresa Sullivan said no one is sure whether an increase in patients will happen, and if it does, when it might happen. The predictions are for an increase, she said, but as yet there’s no way to know if the predictions are correct.

Andrea Carter, chief of the medical staff, said people can help arrest the spread of the virus by following the instructions to avoid close contact with others.

“We’d like to avoid a big surge, right? But the only way we’re really going to do that is keep everybody in their own homes, away from other people,” Carter said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].