On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence said the following regarding the availability of tests that have so far hampered the diagnosis of Covid-19.
“Over a million tests have been distributed,” Pence said, and “before the end of this week, another 4 million tests will be distributed,” according to U.S News and World Report.
It’s not clear, however, whether those tests are reaching the areas that are hardest-hit.
“I’ve heard the government say that they’ve sent out four million test kits but we haven’t, those haven’t hit our states yet, so I am not sure what the deal is with that,” said Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, chief clinical officer for Providence St. Joseph Health, which is based in Renton Washington.
Dr. Compton-Philips’s comments were made in response to a question about whether her facility has been experiencing a shortage of tests, something that she believes resulted in community spread.
“We absolutely have been dealing with a shortage of tests and this is why I’ve got the CEO of Roche on speed dial right now but there simply isn’t the reagents in the country (to do the tests),” she said. Earlier she noted that those reagents come from Europe.
Still private efforts are bearing some fruit, she said.
“The University of Washington in our market has been able to run 1,000 tests a day. LabCorp has done 2,000 a day. Quest I am not sure what they are up to. And we have our own internal test that starting later this week we’ll be able to run, all dependent on the reagent supply that comes in, 500 a day and then ramp up as we get more and more of the reagents. So that logjam is starting to break. What we want to be able to do is screen people but right now we can’t get there. We are at the point where we have to test people that are symptomatic ….”
Like other hospitals that are deploying technology in the battle against this novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, Providence has also rapidly implemented tech while also relying on its existing telemedicine infrastructure.
The nonprofit Catholic charity worked with Microsoft to create a chatbot that people could use to either learn more about the disease or to check symptoms and whether a doctor needs to check them out.
“So you can actually self-service and go in through our chatbot and triage yourself to see what is the care you need which has been an incredibly helpful tool,” Compton-Phillips said. “We turned it on on Monday and day 1 we had 5,000 people go in through the tool. It’s only increased since then.”
She described the ability to have telemedicine tools and the clinical analytic capability to forecast how many people will be affected by the virus as key tools in the battle against this pandemic that were not available even in 2000.
Now, only if more tests were available…
