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Auburn Community Hospital is operating the clinic at the former Cayuga County Nursing Home, where six rooms have been cleaned and updated to screen and treat patients for COVID-19. It's also meant to be a treatment site for other patients with respiratory issues who could potentially test positive for coronavirus.

Use of the clinic is by appointment only. And, similar to getting testing for coronavirus in Cayuga County, people will have to get a physician's referral to schedule an appointment.

Kathleen Cuddy, director of the Cayuga County Health Department, said the idea came from conversations her department had with ACH, as well as county Legislature Chair Aileen McNabb-Coleman and "a number" of local physician offices.

"There was not any one particular office that seemed appropriate because we wanted to make sure that this would be available to everyone in the community, not just people who might have been patients of a certain office practice," she said.

After contacting the state Health Department for permission to convert the off-site space into a COVID-19 treatment site, Cuddy estimated the space was ready for operation in two to three weeks.

Building and Grounds Superintendent Gary Duckett, along with another mechanic from his department, cleaned out the six rooms reserved for clinic patients and got a certificate of occupancy. The updates included checking the lights, heaters and toilets in the areas the medical staff wanted to use — things he said were usual for a project like that.

But they had to complete the updates it in a condensed timeframe to get the clinic running as soon as possible.

Over the course of a week, they replaced broken florescent lighting, checked the heaters and toilets of the vacant rooms. They didn't need to turn on the heat or water because the building maintenance supervisor and another mechanic at the Cayuga County Jail kept the utilities going while the building was out of use. Duckett consulted them on different mechanical issues, like how to make one of the heaters work, so they didn't have to travel between the jail and the eventual clinic.

Aside from the time crunch, Duckett said the biggest challenge was a toilet in one of the rooms that was working fine until it started leaking. "You haven't flushed the toilet in five or six years and you flush it, you don't know what you're going to find," he said.

They also cleaned about 15 other rooms down the hall from the clinic area and around the corner in case they need to expand. They didn't repair the kitchen, cafeteria or community rooms for the building's former nursing home residents.

Having the clinic also allows potential COVID-19 cases to be safely separated from healthier patients, ACH President and CEO Scott Berlucchi said in a statement. "We need to make sure primary care doctors can see patients for problems other than COVID-19 and other respiratory illness," he said.

Berlucchi was glad the hospital was able to work together with the county to staff and open the clinic, which has started taking appointments.

Cuddy felt the area coming together so quickly was an example of effective teamwork between all the parties involved.

"I think this is a really wonderful resource for our community at this point in time because everybody understood the importance and prioritized the community's health first," she said.