State public health officials will be able to get test results for coronavirus faster
Washington state residents who may be ill with the novel coronavirus will get their test results back much faster starting Friday, Feb. 28.
That’s when the Washington State Department of Health will start testing samples from possibly ill people in Shoreline instead of sending them to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which takes seven days to return results.
Samples sent to the state public health laboratory by mid-morning could have results by 5 p.m. the same day. They will be accepted from around the state.
“It’s a lot quicker,” said Dr. Scott Lindquist, the epidemiologist for Washington state, in a news briefing on Thursday, Feb. 27.
The lab will start running two rounds of tests a day, six days a week — testing up to a total of 26 people a day.
That should take care of the backlog of less than a dozen tests in the first day, according to Lindquist.
Symptoms of the illness, also called COVID-19, include fever, cough and shortness of breath.
Under new guidance sent out by the CDC, the state also plans to expand who will be tested to those who may have symptoms but haven’t traveled to areas affected by the outbreak.
For example, people who are severely ill who don’t have another cause for their illness may be tested for coronavirus.
On Wednesday, the CDC confirmed the first case of a Solano County resident in California who tested positive for coronavirus but had no known exposure through travel to affected areas or close contact with someone who was affected. That was the first such transmission and the delay in test results in turn delayed that diagnosis, according to NPR.
A Snohomish County man tested positive for the virus in January, becoming the first person in the U.S. to be diagnosed with the pneumonia-like disease. No one else in the state has been diagnosed since.
Dr. Kathy Lofy, the state health officer, described the current situation in Washington as the “containment phase.”
“We’re working hard to keep the virus out of Washington and to keep the virus from spreading here,” Lofy said Thursday during the briefing.
“These planning efforts may be concerning to some people but there’s really no need to panic,” Lofy continued. “We’re still not seeing a significant spread here in the United States and we’re learning more and more about the virus every day. ”
This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 6:03 PM.
