COLOMBIA – State public health officials say they are working to dramatically increase COVID-19 testing across the state, although they recognize that it usually takes more than a week for Southern Carolines who waited in line to clear their nostrils to really know the results, rendering them essentially useless.
These delays amid an increase in testing are consequently preventing people from lining up to be checked, helping to explain why there has been a setback in testing for weeks, said Dr. Joan Duwve, director of public health at the Department of Health. State Health and Environmental Control.
Other challenges include South Carolina’s stifling summer – reducing the time that test participants can stay outside with protective equipment at drive-thru locations – occupying the sites without affecting the capacity of local hospitals and the national shortage of testing supplies, she told DHEC lawmakers and board members this week.
Drop tests come with dropping cases as well, aided by dozens of SC cities that require masks.
Frustrated lawmakers say they are willing to spend whatever it takes to get the job done – with faster results – but they need solutions, not excuses. They will return next month to allocate the remaining $ 668 million of the $ 1.9 billion that the federal CARES Act sent to South Carolina for COVID-19 refunds to state agencies and local governments.
While recognizing that South Carolina’s per capita testing has improved from 46th to 33rd across the country, as the 264,100 residents tested during July more than doubled the May total, it is still not good enough in a state with one of the country’s highest COVID-19 infection rates, lawmakers said.
If there is a national shortage, clearly other states facing the same problems have found alternative solutions that South Carolina needs to copy, said Sen. Vincent Sheheen on Wednesday, repeating what he said in a series of meetings on the COVID-19 tests. .
“I am very tired of hearing that there are not enough reagents (tests),” said the Camden Democrat, noting that the Legislature has funded all of the agency’s requests so far for this pandemic. “Your agency cannot be successful and we cannot help you if you cannot tell us how to be more successful. I have been asking this question for months.”
Asked what the successful states are doing, Marshall Taylor, DHEC’s acting director, replied, “I don’t have an answer for you.”
More than 5% of South Carolina’s population was tested in July, more than double the 2% DHEC target set in May.
But over the past three weeks, the average number of daily tests has dropped by almost a third, from about 8,750 to about 6,000, according to a DHEC data analysis, looking at seven-day continuous averages.
And the test target should be 10 percent a month to really identify enough infected people, including those without symptoms, to contain the spread, said Senator Tom Davis, who led the Senate panel on testing and screening. contact.
When DHEC officials indicated that this would be feasible at the end of the year, Davis made it clear that this is unacceptable.
“We want this to be achieved now. We are overloading our health resources now. People are becoming infected and dying now,” said Republican Beaufort. “We can’t wait to increase this. It is not a function of money. It is a matter of leadership and coordination of all resources and execution.”
Part of the problem, he said, was the changes from DHEC at the top.
Taylor, the agency’s chief prosecutor, was forced to assume the role of director for the second time in this pandemic in late May, just before the number of cases and deaths in South Carolina skyrocketed.
And Duwve joined the team in mid-April from Indiana, occupying a position held by a provisional placement for more than a year.
A list of recommendations from the Davis panel, adopted by a Senate committee on Wednesday, includes setting the monthly 10 percent test target and providing DHEC how much it costs in personnel, supplies and equipment to achieve it.
“We are on the fast track,” Duwve told board members on Thursday, calling the test spike “Operation Warp Speed”.
The measures taken by DHEC so far include the hiring of four laboratories to increase the public agency’s test capacity to 8,800 daily tests – up from the 2,000 it managed to achieve in early June by operating in two shifts seven days a week.
DHEC is also demanding that these laboratories, by contract, correspond to the return of test results from the public laboratory within 48 hours, Duwve said.
“Results that take six to eight days to reach a patient don’t help us,” Taylor told the senators. “It is just a number that does not help us.”
The agency also promised that there will be at least one test event weekly in all 46 counties starting in September – an initiative that DHEC officials initially said would start in August.
More than 140 temporary drive-thru test events are scheduled until the end of September, in addition to 222 health units and pharmacies offering tests, according to DHEC.
People who waited in line for hours at these events reported not knowing for a month or more whether the test was positive or negative that day. In the meantime, they are out and about. And for those who were positive, DHEC was unable to take the next step and make calls to find out who else they may have infected before it is too late.
Mobile test sites across the state have temporarily increased the time it took people to get results, said Heather Woolwine, a spokeswoman for the Medical University of South Carolina, DHEC’s primary testing partner.
Her laboratory was taking up to 10 days to provide residents with a diagnosis, but that dropped to between five and seven, she said.
The machines themselves were part of MUSC’s problem, as uninterrupted processing caused breakdowns that few technicians across the country could fix, Woolwine said.
The 10-day wait for results has been common in many states due to accumulations in private laboratories, said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policies at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But there is no recovery average across the country, as there is nothing that requires any laboratory to report this data. Adding to the problem is the lack of incentive for suppliers and test labs to be fast, as they will be paid for anyway, he said.
“In places where you have a lot of cases and an increase in testing because of that, there is a limitation on supplies. All of this works to clog the system and slow things down, ”said Michaud. “It is almost useless to obtain test results over a week. It does not help anyone. But the laboratory will be paid for.”
Quest Diagnostics, a private laboratory that performs COVID-19 tests, explained that it had to prioritize processing last month amid an increase in testing, including from the South, for hospitalized people, people at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying, and professionals of health.
In the midst of this peak, any test that was not a priority patient could take more than a week to be analyzed.
But there are no more delays, and the average return has dropped to two to three days, thanks to a combination of decreased demand and increased capacity, said Kim Gorode, a spokesman for the New Jersey-based laboratory.
For hospitals like Roper St. Francis Healthcare, the lack of test reagent was the main obstacle.
The Charleston hospital receives a new shipment weekly and, if the supply runs out in a few days, it will be stuck outside until the next shipment, said Dr. Chris McLain, his chief physician.
“It is simply a matter of supply,” he said. “There is not enough”.
He thinks fewer people are lining up to take the test in the state. But he also thinks the spread of the disease has started to slow, partly thanks to rules covering about 40% of South Carolina’s population. He pointed to fewer hospital admissions in the state in the past week.
“If it were just a delay in getting results, we would see more people arriving,” he said.