Iowa City Today

University Of Iowa Hospital & Clinics recently issued the following announcement.

By this point in the pandemic, it’s safe to say that many—if not all—of us have received a COVID-19 test.

But what many of us don’t consider is the work involved in processing the swabs to see if they contain traces of COVID-19, the flu, and other respiratory illnesses.

With the increase of COVID-19 cases in our community, it’s a no-brainer that testing demands are also increasing. To help break down how UI Health Care is managing the testing surge, we sat down with Brad Ford, MD, PhD, clinical associate professor of pathology.

During this most recent surge of COVID-19 cases, how many tests would you say UI Health Care averages a day? How much higher is that number than months prior?

Last summer, COVID-19 cases waned, and we only performed about 600 COVID tests a day during weekdays. Currently, we’re at about 1,200 tests per day and anticipate that number increasing further. Last year, other viruses like the flu weren’t prevalent, so we didn’t test for them. This year, however, we’re testing SARS -CoV-2 candidates for influenza A and B as well, meaning we are performing roughly 3,500 tests per day of various kinds. In the first week of January, we saw about 2,000 tests that returned positive results for a virus, 95% of which were positive results for COVID-19.

What are some of the difficulties that come with our current testing volume?

With most infectious diseases, the testing volume stays somewhat static, making most testing needs are relatively easy to staff because, at worst, we see modestly cyclical volumes in gastrointestinal illness and respiratory viruses during the winter months. However, COVID-19 has been both cyclical and unpredictable in volumes of testing seen and the duration of this increased testing demand with the arrival of different variants.

How do we overcome those difficulties?

We’ve been able to address this by building one testing pipeline— rather than a patchwork of multiple kinds of test platforms—that can scale up or down easily. This means that our system contains redundancy of instrumentation, as well as standardization of the test process and training. We’ve polished all aspects of our process from the couriers to result reporting and queues in Epic, so that various types of waste are minimized, and people are working as efficiently as possible. Today, we have a highly optimized analytical test system, but we continue to rely heavily on various departments throughout the organization, including purchasing, HR, the quality improvement program, and many others, to help us work through supply chain issues and staff shortages.

Why is testing so important?

It’s important because it serves as another safety measure as well as a component of our core mission of diagnosis and treatment. Testing for patient and staff safety, epidemiology, diagnosis, prognosis and secondary reasons, such as travel and exposures, remains important. And this year, with the return of other respiratory viruses, it has become more important to test not only for COVID-19 but for those other viruses as well. We have a total of three platforms for testing in the central microbiology laboratory, all of which are capable of performing more than just COVID-19 testing.

What do you have to say about those employees who have staffed these testing labs?

Our employees in the labs have dealt with a great deal of uncertainty and a highly variable work schedule throughout the pandemic. They have stepped up quietly and selflessly to keep everything running these last two years, and we are extremely grateful that they continue to push as hard as they do for the good of our patients and the institution. Throughout the pandemic, employees from across the Department of Pathology have provided valuable assistance to support our testing activities. Assistance has and continues to come in many forms, including kit making, unpacking specimens as they are received in the lab, preparing specimens for further processing, and helping to organize and manage supplies and inventory.  Most recently, two employees with prior experience in Clinical Laboratory Science temporarily joined our laboratory staff to supplement our capacity to meet current and anticipated demand for additional testing.  We are currently soliciting other volunteers from the Department of Pathology who may also be willing to help in response to the current surge.

Original source can be found here.