COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Twenty-seven staff members and six patients have tested positive for coronavirus in an outbreak at a Columbus hospital

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center says this cluster was discovered at their East Hospital.

OSU Wexner Medical Center typically holds a weekly coronavirus briefing but that was canceled, and they did not provide any additional statements.

We did speak with the President of the Ohio State University Nurses Organization who says there needs to be more transparency.

OSU Wexner Medical Center says the exposure started after a staff member came to work with symptoms.

“Everybody’s really working to the point of exhaustion,” said Rick Lucas. He says this could have happened anywhere. The positive cases make up 2 percent of the entire 1200-person workforce.

Lucas says the reality is that could be an entire shift for a department.

“How do you backfill that?” he questioned, “There aren’t more healthcare workers, so people are just going to be spread thinner. So, they’re going to still caring for the same number of patients but with 27 less staff so that’s very concerning.”

Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Andrew Thomas addressed the outbreak in a statement saying, “We take this incident very seriously. We are conducting contact tracing and testing all staff and patients who spent significant time on the unit during that timeframe.”

That time frame according to the hospital is December 20th, 2020 up to January 1st.

There are still many questions like what intervention measures are they implementing and how does this effect patients going there now.

“They absolutely should have held their conference today and spoke to the public and answered the questions, I mean we have an obligation to answer folks concerns and assure them we’re doing everything that we can to keep everyone safe.”

Columbus Public Health is helping with the investigation.