One of the country’s largest commercial labs has faced a backlog of Coronavirus tests, delaying results up to ten days in many cases.
As of March 25th, Quest Diagnostics had approximately 160,000 unprocessed Coronavirus test orders. This was nearly half of the 320,000 total orders that the company received up to that date, according to Quest internal materials obtained by CNN.
Wendy Bost, a spokesperson for Quest, revealed to CNN that the backlog for the crucial tests has decreased in recent days as a result of the company expanding its testing capacity. Quest now processes more than 30,000 tests per day with an average turnaround time of four to five days.
“Much of the backlog was due to huge demand in the early days of testing when we were primarily offering a lab-developed test we developed at a single laboratory,” Bost explained. “In recent days, our capacity has exceeded our demand, allowing us to reduce the backlog.” Quest is not alone in dealing with turnaround times of multiple days and other testing complications resulting from extreme demand.
Quest is just one of several other commercial labs that have launched and expanded its testing capacity over the last month, according to CNN. In March, leaders from Quest, LabCorp, and other companies met with White House officials to discuss testing expansion. Trump referred to the plan “a new partnership with private sector to vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the Coronavirus.”
Despite a large network of labs at public health departments and universities also lending their capabilities to Coronavirus testing, the Trump administration has leaned heavily on commercial labs to roll out widespread testing.
State officials and healthcare workers, and patients have criticized the pace of Coronavirus testing in the United States, believing that the rate of testing is insufficient in enacting timely quarantining of diagnosed patients. The delay in testing also makes it difficult to understand the virus in its entirety.
Dr. Joseph Kanter, an ER doctor in New Orleans and the Assistant State Health Officer for the Louisiana Department of Health, explained that the longer the wait for test results, the more personal protective equipment that facilities have to use, which is currently in short supply nationally but must be used when treating patients who have been tested until they’re confirmed cleared.
“The faster we can turn those tests around, some of those will be negative, and we’ll save the PPE burn. It’s getting better, but it still is a bottleneck.” Kanter said.
Megan Schlanser, a nurse, working in Michigan, said that limited testing is even preventing frontline health workers from knowing whether or not they have contracted the virus.
“We’re not getting tested. The scary thing is that we could potentially all be carriers and even not even show symptoms… so I could be potentially infecting all of my coworkers,” Schlanser said.
38-year-old attorney Shannon Mason in northern California revealed to I that she is still waiting for the result of the test she had conducted on March 18th. She is at a higher risk of becoming ill due to an immune dysfunction that she suffers from. After becoming sick with a cough and fever in February that eventually became a respiratory infection, she went to the ER at the University of California-Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. After testing negative for the flu, she was administered the Coronavirus test.
“I was feeling really bad. That’s the worst I’ve ever felt,” said Mason.
She also revealed that she has repeatedly called the medical center to inquire about her result, but has yet to get an answer. CNN also contacted the medical center but did not hear back.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that in order to safely loosen restrictions on public gatherings and reopen businesses, faster testing is vital.
“So that when you identify someone who’s infected, that person doesn’t go out into society for a few days, infect a bunch of people, and then you bring them back because the test is positive,” Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Other factors can impact testing turnaround, such as transport time, which LabCorp revealed to be a factor in some cases. Otherwise, four to five days is their standard. However, ARUP Laboratories, for example, was accepting specimens earlier this month but was forced to stop due to “supply constraints in the face of extraordinary demand,” the company said.
Many hospital systems are taking matters into their own hands by implementing internal testing, which cuts down on turnaround time since they do not have to ship the specimens out.
In Michigan, the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan said test results for admitted patients are returned in 24 hours with outpatients samples continuing to be sent to outside labs that usually provide results in about a week.
While the Yale-New Haven Health System continues to ship specimens to outside labs, it still conducts its own in-house testing for the sickest patients and crucial healthcare workers.
“Initially, we sent out a lot of samples to Quest, but their turnaround times were quite delayed recently, sometimes over a week. We’re now transitioning to the Mayo Clinic Labs for our outpatient specimen testing,” said Steven Choi, the health system’s chief quality officer.
On Monday, Trump announced that the United States had tested more than 1 million people for the virus thus far.
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