Why It Takes so Long to Get Coronavirus Testing Results

different turnaround times. Julie Appleby, senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News, joins us for the steps involved in testing and new ones on the way. Thanks for joining us, Julie, Thanks for having me. A lot has been made about testing throughout this whole coronavirus pandemic right now, as everybody is clamoring to get tested, we're seeing serious backlogs on this. Still it still takes a long time, despite a bunch

of new tests coming out. Besides new companies working on tests saying that you know, we can get results in uh, you know, as little as minutes to a few hours, there's still a lot of apps that are involved in all of this, and that's why things are taking so long. So Julie tell us a little bit about this. Take us behind the scenes that what this testing looks like, right,

and it does take a long time. As we've seen, people are being told, you know, you have to wait five or six or seven days in some cases to get a test. So why is that? So let's back up a little bit. We had some problems initially when the first CDC test came out. Those were resolved. More and more labs now have approval to run these tests, and larger labs and the hospital labs, ETCeteras are and as you mentioned, we're starting to see some quicker tests,

but it still takes some time. There's a number of steps in the process. Like first you get your nose swabs right with one of these things, and they put that swab in a little tube and they send it off to the lab and the lab then has to do some pretty sophisticated analysis of this sample, right to figure out do you have COVID or not and that and real quick. That's the first step, actually getting swabbed and then sending it to a lab. That could take up to a day depending on where the lab is,

how far it is from where you got test. That's correct. You've got to think about transit time. There's about a day lag there. Now, there are some places that are doing testing on site, So if you're at a large academic medical center, chances are they might have their own testing capability at depth center, but they're probably limiting the testing too in patients and to their hospital staff. So the reason they can get a result back a little quicker there is because they just do it in house,

so they don't have that transit time. But even when they do it in house, there's a bunch of steps that have to be done. They have to put them in a machine. Generally, there's there's some manual work that the technician does. They have to extract some RNA and amplify the DNA, and there's all this science kind of stuff. Some of it's done manually, but a lot of places, these big commercial labs have these machines that run them automatically, so they're faster. They can process more samples at a

time in a piece i road. I talked to pathology lab at mid Star Medical Center in Georgetown here in Washington, d C. And they can run nine three samples at a time in their machine. And they can run about three of those icles a day. Okay, so that's why they do it in the house at this hospital, but they're kind of limited in the number they can do.

Whereas if you go to a test site and they might send it off to a large commercial lab that's that can process twenty or thirty thousand of these a day, so that might be faster, but then you've got to transit time and they've got a big backlog. So these are all the reasons why it can take a number of days to get results back in some cases, and in other cases you might get an answer back sooner. And one of the other difficulties is that there's so

many people that want to get tested. They want to have peace of mind to know whether they do not have it, or they want confirmation if they're getting they have some type of symptoms. They want to know they have it so they can know what to do. And in a lot of these places, it's like almost a sign like no Watkins welcome kind of thing, because you know, some of these sites have to you have to follow a line. Basically, you know, somebody coming off the street

just can't get their tests and get it done. They need to prioritize these things to healthcare workers, to people that really have bad symptoms and are in hot need hospitalization. And that's true. That's because we don't have enough test in the United States right now. They're working on ramping that up. As you mentioned, We've we've got some new test kits out there starting to go out that that can get results back quicker, and those are expected to

be sort of point of care. When you walk in your doctor's office or the emergency room, you might be able to get a result back in five to thirteen minutes. But that just got a proof, you know, Friday night, and they're they're going to start shipping them. They're hoping to ship fifty thousand of them a day. But there's a lot of people like you mentioned that just want that peace of mind or you know, if you've got it,

you really need to isolate yourself. And so it's good to know do you have it or not, But we're not there yet. Yeah, the test that you were just talking about that we can get the one that just kind of got to prove this past Friday, the President was talking about that one. Um, you know, just trying to get people hope really that you know, you can get tested and get a result very quickly, but even

that still needs to get ramped up. Those little test kits need to be made and sent out, and there's a lot of stuff that goes into it, and and we're hearing a lot about shortages specifically with healthcare workers with personal protective equipment, masks, all that stuff, But these testing kits also suffer from some of those shortages. The chemical agency using those kits, these swabs to get the samples.

There's a lot of things that are in short supply right now, and all of that needs to get ramped up. That's correct, and that's why some of these groups, the big lab testing groups and some of those are saying, let's limit the testing right now and to these high priority people because there are these shortage and asks kind

of backing up manufacturing in some cases. I spoke with a manufacturer who was, you know, working on making sure he could get all the right little chemicals to put in it and and the swabs and that kind of thing. And he has multiple suppliers, but he's on the phone working this thing to make sure that happens. And there's just a big demand for these products right now, you keep hearing it a lot. We're all in this together.

We have to practice the social distancing. There's a bit of patients that goes into this that unfortunately a lot of people don't have because you know, you hear scary words like pandemic and whatnot, and people are legitimately concerned. So but it is kind of this patients that we have to practice with all of this as well, right,

And more and more of these are getting approved. I mean, just in a couple of days since I wrote my story, there's been a couple more tests approved under these emergency use authorizations by the FDA, So more tests are coming on the market. There's another entire kind of test which tries to figure out if you have immunity if you already had the disease, and those are gonna We're gonna

start hearing more about those. They're not available widely here in the United States yet, but other countries are working on that, getting folks tested to figure out, hey, maybe it's safe you go back to work. You've had the disease, you presumably have immunity now. Julie Appleby, senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News, thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has

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