Civic Register
| 4.2.20
Coronavirus Testing Crisis: Quest Diagnostics Has Backlog of 115,000 Tests - How Should We Respond?
Does the U.S. healthcare system need to develop the capacity to widely test patients?
What's the story?
- One of the nation's largest commercial labs, Quest Diagnostics, has a backlog of anywhere from 115,000 to 160,000 coronavirus tests.
- Quest, however, is just one of an expanding number of private labs whose testing backlogs have ballooned in recent days.
- Results for tests have been delayed for up to 10 days.
- Also concerning: though Quest Diagnostics has a significant backlog, it has continued to accept specimens from across the country. Writes The Atlantic:
"Quest failed to come to terms with its ongoing problems, and it continued to accept specimens - and generate revenue - when other laboratories could have done some of the tests faster."
The problem with delayed test results
The lack of confirmation about whether someone has COVID-19 slows efficient patient care and delivers an incomplete view of the outbreak to state officials.
- State officials and public health workers need to know where the virus is spreading (or not) to inform policies on enforcing or easing social distancing.
- Doctors need to know who has COVID-19 to care for these sick patients and to protect healthcare workers and non-infected patients from getting the virus. It also tells doctors when to use the dwindling supply of personal protective equipment, or PPE.
- “Lab turnaround time is PPE,” Geoff Baird, the acting laboratory-medicine chair at the University of Washington, told The Atlantic.
“More than a day is a tragedy. Three to five is okay for outpatients if they can sit at home, but it doesn’t address the problem in a hospital.”
Varied by state
- Numbers of pending tests vary widely by state. Consider California. The Golden State has 59,100 pending tests as of 2 ET April 2.
- Though the most populous state in the union, California has only managed to complete around 1800 tests each day, on average.
- This means that two of every three people tested for COVID-19 in California don't know their results.
- “It’s not as if it’s a train running along, as you might’ve heard,” William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University School of Medicine professor of preventive medicine and an infectious-disease doctor, told USA Today. “Because testing is restricted still in many parts of the country.”
What do you think?
Should private labs stop accepting new tests if they have a backlog? Should certain tests be prioritized? Have you tried to get tested? Take action above, then share your thoughts below.
—Josh Herman
(Photo Credit: Screen Capture from CNN)
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