Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie on Wednesday confirmed a U.S. veteran is currently undergoing treatment for the coronavirus at a VA facility in California, CNN reports.
The VA provides healthcare at over 1,200 facilities across the U.S., but had not confirmed any cases of the coronavirus being treated at one of them until Wilkie, who is a member of the coronavirus task force, testified before legislators Wednesday.
"We began moving on supply chain and preparation really before this became a national issue," Wilkie told members of the House Appropriations Committee. "Case in point is the one veteran, that we know of, who has this virus. We prepared a swath, a section of our Palo Alto campus to receive veterans who have this virus. We set it up for that and that veteran is being taken care of there."
The secretary said after the hearing that VA staff and facilities "rehearse all the time, for epidemics and natural disasters — we are constantly rehearsing and just change the name on whatever we are dealing with . . . if it's Ebola, if it's H1N1, that's how we deal with it."
He added he is unaware of any shortages of testing kits at VA facilities, which CNN reports some local health officials in California have raised concerns about.
"We do all sorts of things, we have questionnaires, we take temperatures . . . we are using our own resources," Wilkie said.
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