More than three weeks after the first coronavirus cases were announced in the state, state and private laboratories are so crowded that many people are waiting a week or more to see if they are among the hundreds of South Carolina pandemic victims.
As more people look for tests, laboratories struggle to keep up with the high volume. But leaders of local hospitals say they hope to see the waiting time improve next week.
Dr. Chris McLain, chief physician at Roper St. Francis, said the response time for test results was only a few days at the start of the South Carolina pandemic impact.
This schedule has now extended to between seven and nine days.
“We are trying to improve this recovery,” he said. Patients are told how long they are likely to wait to hear their results.
The hospital heard from the giant LabCorp laboratory that it is seeing a record number of samples, and the team is working 24 hours.
The backlog is expected to increase as more private labs go online with test resources in South Carolina. Hospitals have also taken action with their own hands, testing themselves.
Meanwhile, state health leaders have said repeatedly that they do not want all patients to be tested. In this way, test supplies are kept for the sickest patients.
Even at the state laboratory, the necessary supplies began to run out. When the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control ran out of reagents, chemicals needed to validate the results, the tests had to be stopped for two days last week.
This pause created an accumulation of 1,800 samples awaiting evaluation. More of the chemicals arrived at the state laboratory on Friday morning, and the shelving was resolved over the weekend.
“We have more than enough to get rid of our backlog right now,” said Nick Davidson, director of public health at DHEC, on Friday afternoon. “As time goes on, we will have to monitor this.”
Melissa Soule, of Goose Creek, said she underwent four telehealth tests, an urgent care appointment and a six-day wait before finally finding out that her 12-year-old son had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Officials from the Medical University of South Carolina and DHEC contacted her with conflicting advice about how long he should be quarantined, Soule said. The time period ranged from three days after the symptoms disappeared to 14 days after the tests were performed, she said.
“It was everywhere,” she said, noting that she chose the longest period of isolation to ensure that other people were not exposed.
Some samples sent to DHEC are taking a week or more to return, said MUSC spokeswoman Heather Woolwine. Patients whose samples were sent to private laboratories wait between five and seven days. As soon as private laboratories started offering tests, hospitals flooded these companies with cotton swabs.
“As soon as the pipeline was opened, many hospitals and suppliers across the state were trying to ship their batches,” Woolwine said in a statement.
MUSC also started processing its own tests at the site a week ago, after receiving approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
On Monday, Woolwine said that it takes the MUSC lab a day or two to return the results. The health care system hopes to run most of its tests at the local laboratory soon.
With its full capacity, the laboratory will be able to perform up to 300 tests per day. The average waiting time is expected to drop in the next two weeks, Woolwine said, with the ultimate goal of reversing the results in one day.
Of the 3,500 people who drove through the MUSC collection site in West Ashley so far, about 2,900 have heard of their results.
These waiting times are not affecting all hospitals in the area; a spokesman for Trident Health said its response time averages two days. Trident Health, which operates Trident Medical Center in North Charleston and Summerville Medical Center, is using a private laboratory through its parent company, hospital giant HCA Healthcare.
Roper St. Francis is working to conduct its own tests with on-site equipment that is already approved by the FDA. But it is also waiting for the arrival of chemical reagents.
Soule, who was also ill, said she should assume that she was positive for the virus, although she was not treated or counted in the official state count. She chose to contact her son’s school and gym to alert them after learning that DHEC had no plans to do so, she said.
“All of these things are developing in each other to make this a bigger problem than it already is,” she said. “It helps people to deny that this is a problem.
Reach Mary Katherine Wildeman at 843-607-4312. Follow her on Twitter @mkwildeman.