Testing Czar: Don’t get ‘hung up on the numbers’, urges focused testing
BIRMINGHAM, AL (WBRC) – The State Health Officer said decreasing testing is “concerning” as Alabama is on track to test 15,000 fewer people for COVID-19 this week than in weeks past.
“That has to do with different reasons in different cases,” said Alabama Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris. “In the case of public health, we have some significant shortages of the testing reagents that are actually used in the laboratory to actually process the test. The main testing platform that our lab uses has a reagent that, that had the allocation reduced dramatically by the company that makes that reagent. So, we now have in about a-quarter of the reagents that we were getting two-or three weeks ago.”
The shortage supply is impacting turnaround times for the Bureau of Clinical Laboratories (BCL), increasing the waiting time from 3 days to 7, said Dr. Harris.
“The majority of testing is done by commercial labs, academic medical centers, hospitals and so on but still, they all are facing their own individual issues with their own testing supplies. We had a couple weeks in a row, maybe 3 weeks or so, where we were between 75,000 to 90,000 tests a week. The last week and a half, we are on pace to be somewhere in the 60s, 60,000 tests per week, so definitely a drop off there,” said Dr. Harris.
“I wouldn’t get too much hung up on the numbers. I think we really need to get focused on are we getting the testing to the right people at the right time and that really is particularly important in Alabama because you are experiencing a rise in the number of cases and a rise in the positivity of cases,” said Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Admiral Giroir is on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and leads the nation’s testing efforts. He said while there might be delays at ADPH’s BCL, more than 90% of tests in Alabama are processed with 3 days.
“You should be in good shape,” he said.
Even still, Dr. Harris wants to decrease the turnaround time at ADPH’s BCL and expand testing capacity, especially as students are returning to school.
The reagents BCL uses are not supplied by HHS, but Admiral Giroir said there are shortages. “We put the public health labs almost on a pedestal, they have their own supply chain that we supply them. This is all free of charge to the public health laboratories, they all get a supply of point-of-care tests. So, in general, if you look at a public health laboratory, they’re really not short of supplies, they might be short of a specific thing they want but they can make it up in other ways,” said Giroir. “I put a notice out several weeks that if any public health lab wants to double their output, I will guarantee the supplies to do that. I have not heard from a single public health lab that they could really expand that much.”
A spokesperson for ADPH said it never received that offer from HHS.
“You don’t test your way out of this and that’s one thing I want to make sure people understand. You don’t fix that by doing more testing. Testing can be supportive, but you fix this by policies,” said Giroir. “I was just in Arizona yesterday and Arizona had a positivity rate well over 22%, in some places it was 25%. That’s down to under 12% now, it’s even under 10% in many places, hospitalizations are down, and they did it with the 3 Ws (Wear a Mask, Watch your Distance, Wash Your Hands) without stopping the economy and without trying to do something unrealistic like testing everyone everyday which is not possible and it doesn’t work. The 3 Ws will work, it will work for Alabama.”
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