Some Idahoans have to wait 10 days for coronavirus test results. Here’s why
A student at Brigham Young University-Idaho came down with symptoms of COVID-19 on Sunday, March 8, a public health agency in eastern Idaho announced this week. He returned to Rexburg the following Wednesday, having traveled to another state that had an outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Still not feeling well, the college student stayed in his apartment.
He sought testing the next day. That was March 12. It took five days for the student, who’s in his 20s, to learn he was indeed sick with the coronavirus disease. It was Idaho’s eighth confirmed COVID-19 infection.
The days of waiting for test results are becoming more common for Idaho patients. While the state has ramped up its testing, more samples from sick patients are being shipped to large commercial laboratories in Washington, Colorado or even farther afield. Supplies are still low. And one Treasure Valley laboratory has a machine that could be testing up to 400 patients a day for COVID-19, but it sits unused.
The Idaho Bureau of Laboratories on Tuesday told health care providers that it will no longer run tests at its Boise lab for patients who aren’t hospitalized, and who aren’t deemed a “high priority for public health purposes” by local public health agencies. All other samples — from doctor’s offices, urgent care clinics or drive-through testing sites, for example — must now be sent to commercial labs, it said.
Kristen Drew’s husband is one of those patients.
Her husband, whom she did not want to identify, is now quarantined in their Boise home as they await test results from a COVID-19 test he received Monday morning at a Saint Alphonsus Health System urgent care clinic. He went to the clinic after traveling to another state and coming home feeling like he had influenza. His flu test was negative.
“He went in, and when he told them what was going on, they gave him a mask and told him to wait in his car,” Drew said.
They were told at first that the results would take 24 hours, she said. But when her husband called Wednesday to check on his results, she says the clinic told him, “At this time, you’re going to have to wait an additional seven to 10 days, and until then, you’re going to have to stay quarantined.”
Who’s doing COVID-19 tests?
The state lab can run only 60 tests a day, State Epidemiologist Dr. Christine Hahn said Tuesday.
Private or commercial labs began running tests for Idaho patients earlier this month. But they’re all out of state. Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp were among the first to start taking samples from Idaho patients; their labs are in Seattle, Denver, cities in California and other places in the U.S.
Idaho health care providers also were getting tests run by a Utah lab. Salt Lake City-based ARUP started doing COVID-19 tests on March 12. That lasted four days.
“Due to supply constraints in the face of extraordinary demand,” the company could no longer accept tests from places like Idaho, ARUP announced March 16.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said Wednesday that an Oregon lab, Interpath Laboratory, also was running tests for Idaho. Interpath’s website said Thursday that it is no longer taking COVID-19 samples.
Meanwhile, a Treasure Valley lab has one of the few machines that can run tests for the novel coronavirus. But the machine’s manufacturer, Roche Diagnostics Corp., has given priority to larger labs for support needed to run the machine.
“When we reached out to Roche, they said, ‘Well, we’re busy with the large labs right now,’” said Dr. Ryan Cole, a local pathologist who owns Cole Diagnostics in Garden City.
Cole said he called Roche at the end of February and received a response March 2.
The company told him they could get to Cole Diagnostics in 30 to 45 days, he said.
“By then, there will be thousands of cases in Idaho,” Cole said. “We can’t wait that long.”
Federal plan freezes out local labs like Cole
The lab typically serves about 50,000 patients a year. Cole estimates he could be doing 200 tests a day by next week if Roche sent out a technician to do a software update necessary to add COVID-19 testing ability, and if it provided the reagents he needs to use the machine.
There is currently a nationwide strain on supply of those reagents — chemicals that are necessary to process the tests.
Cole said his lab could do 400 tests a day if he staffed up to around-the-clock operations. Cole Diagnostics could have started doing those hundreds of tests weeks ago, if local labs hadn’t been put in line behind large national labs like Quest, he said.
“At the local level, when you get down to the brass tacks of testing, there’s nothing there, except for the state lab, and they’re doing the best they can,” Cole said.
He is frustrated that his Roche testing machine is “going to be silent for 30 days while a pandemic runs amok,” he said. “The only way to catch something early is at the local level. (Otherwise) you’re three to four days into a diseased patient spreading it” by the time results come back, he said.
A spokesman for Roche told the Statesman this week that Cole Diagnostics is one of “many excellent labs across the country” that could be running the COVID-19 test “and have been asking to do so,” but the company can’t meet demand right now.
“Because the demand for COVID-19 testing is much greater than supply, we worked with government agencies to develop an allocation strategy for our (novel coronavirus test) and instruments that prioritizes labs with the broadest geographic reach and highest patient impact,” spokesman Mike Weist said in an email.
That plan allows “a little over 30 laboratory sites” in the U.S., including those owned by Quest and LabCorp, to run the tests at first, Weist said. “These labs also have the ability to implement high-volume testing immediately,” he said.
Cole said the federal government has “dropped the ball” on handling the coronavirus pandemic.
“People are unnecessarily going to pass away because this entire process has become just a circus,” Cole said. “We’re here to take care of people. We have the manpower, the woman-power, the intellectual power. ... It’s a lack of resources and, basically, just common sense in a lot of cases.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2020 at 1:57 PM.
