10 days, 160,000 backlog tests of clonavirus test results: fighting for US pandemic

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that safely reducing restrictions on US businesses and public gatherings depends on the availability of faster tests.

Quest spokesperson Wendy Bost told CNN that the backlog of coronavirus testing has recently started to decline as the company expands its capacity. .

“Much of the backlog was largely due to the great demand in early testing, which provided lab-developed tests we developed in a single lab,” said Bost. “Recently, our capabilities have exceeded our demand and have been able to reduce the backlog.”

Quest goes beyond just addressing several days of turnaround time and other test complications arising from extreme demands.

Another leading commercial lab company, LabCorp, has a turnaround time of about 4-5 days, depending on factors such as transport time.

In March, Quest, Labcorp, and other company leaders met with White House officials to discuss extended testing. President Trump has advertised the plan as “a new partnership with the private sector to significantly expand and accelerate coronavirus testing capacity.”

However, some healthcare professionals say that CNN tests are not accelerating fast enough.

Dr. Joseph Kanter, a New Orleans ER physician and assistant to the State Department of Health at the Louisiana State Department of Health, said that hospitals had to use more personal protective equipment when waiting longer for test results. You. When treating a patient who has been tested until it is confirmed that the virus is free.

“If we could change these tests faster, some of them would be negative and save PPE combustion,” Canter said. “It’s getting better, but it’s still a bottleneck,” he said.

Megan Schranser, a Michigan nurse, said that limited testing made it impossible to tell whether or not frontline healthcare workers, including uncomfortable colleagues, were infected with the virus.

“We have not been tested,” Schranser said. “The scary thing is that we can all be carriers and even show no symptoms … so it can infect all of our colleagues.”

Some patients who waited for the first virus test have not yet obtained results.

Shannon Mason, a 38-year-old lawyer in northern California, told CNN that he is still waiting for the results of the Covid-19 test on March 18.

Mason said he was particularly at risk due to immune dysfunction and said he had become very ill in February due to cough and fever and had a respiratory infection.

She finally went to the ER at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “I was really sick, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt,” Mason said, saying she had a negative flu test.

Mason is still waiting for the results of her test, and she has repeatedly called the medical center and has called for her results, saying that no one seems to know the results. CNN contacted the medical center but received no response.

Various hospital systems have begun performing their own internal coronavirus tests, reducing the time required to send samples to external laboratories.

The Yale New Haven Health System performs its own in-house tests for the most sick patients and critical healthcare professionals, while the rest goes to an external lab.

“Initially we sent many samples to Quest, but lately delivery times have been significantly delayed, and in some cases took over a week,” said Steven Choi, Chief Quality Officer of the healthcare system States. “We are currently moving to the Mayo Clinic Lab for outpatient testing.”

A spokesperson for the RWJ Barnabas Health hospital system in New Jersey told CNN that while in-house tests take hours, most of the tests are sent to private labs that require 5-10 days for results. .

According to the Michigan’s Henry Ford Health System, inpatient test results are returned within 24 hours, but outpatient samples are usually sent to an external lab where results are available in about a week.

Quest spokesperson Bost told CNN that hospitals could test patients in sick hospitals more efficiently, but commercial labs like Quest would test far more patients at the regional level. He said he had the ability and logistics work.

Bost added that labs around the country were constrained by global supply chain issues.

Some state department and laboratory healthcare professionals told CNN in March that swabs and reagents used to extract the viral genetic code from swabs, and others to conduct Covid-19 tests. He said that he needed materials.

A spokesperson for the University of Nebraska said Tuesday that two laboratories on coronavirus campus testing were able to turn the results in 4-6 hours, but due to lack of reagents, laboratories had to limit capacity Said there was no.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, lab backlogs have jumped 5-7 days from 48-72 hours last week due to a lack of overall testing volume and reagents.

“We have the reagents in stock, but it took a few days, during which time the samples were in the queue,” spokeswoman John Hauser said.

Some commercial labs have stated that they have reduced the backlog that has occurred after initially deploying the coronavirus test. For example, a spokesman for Eurofins states that its lab is currently performing 7,000 tests a day with a 24-hour turnaround time.

Caroline Bucky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard TH, said the School of Public Health has completely removed the entire spectrum of the virus until the U.S. Understood and stated that it could not be dealt with effectively.

“At this point, we haven’t done enough testing to figure out what’s going on with community-level submissions and almost certainly overlook many cases,” says Buckee.