By Brianna Abbott, The Wall Street Journal
Escalating demand for Covid-19 tests is prompting some laboratories to ration access, giving priority to people with symptoms or other health concerns as the Omicron variant quickly spreads.
Triaging who is eligible for Covid-19 tests can help ensure that patients who need a test the most get results fast enough to isolate or get treatment, pathologists and public-health experts say. The strategy, however, risks perpetuating the virus’s spread if some people get turned away from testing altogether.
“What we don’t want is for people to not be able to get tested in the community and then show up at the ER to get testing,” said Melissa Miller, director of the University of North Carolina’s microbiology lab. “But there is a maximum amount that you can collect in a day.”
UNC is restricting tests to people with Covid-19 symptoms, employees and patients who need a test before surgeries. Dr. Miller said UNC is running about 1,200 tests a day and returning results to patients within 24 hours. About a third of the tests are coming back positive, she said.
The University of Washington temporarily closed some of its testing sites on Tuesday and is giving appointment priority to people with Covid-19 symptoms or a known exposure. The turnaround time for test results had stretched past two days, beyond the university’s 24-hour goal, said Geoffrey Baird, UW Medicine’s acting chair of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, at a Dec. 30 media briefing.
“A Covid test that is not back for several days, it just isn’t terribly meaningful because someone could go on and spread the virus,” Dr. Baird said.
Dr. Baird also said the proportion of test results coming back positive is too high to take advantage of a common resource-saving technique. UW Medicine often uses a single test on multiple patient samples at once, a process called pooling, which saves time and resources when most samples are negative. But pooling doesn’t work if too many samples are positive because lab workers often have to retest the batches to find the positive results.
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