Sedgwick County expanding coronavirus COVID-19 testing, supply shortage still problem
After weeks of limiting coronavirus testing to a relative handful of people per day, Sedgwick County is about to ramp up the effort, the county health director said Wednesday.
Adrienne Byrne told county commissioners that the Health Department has contracted with a private-sector lab and should be able to increase its tests to about 50 a day.
That’s more than twice to three times as many as the 15-20 people a day the county has been testing since the pandemic began.
Availability of the kits for collecting samples remains the biggest hurdle to more widespread testing that could give a better handle on the extent of community spread of the virus, Deputy County Manager Tim Kaufman said.
“Our current inventory is 221 sampling kits,” he said. “As an example, the most recent request we sent to the state was a request for 1,000 kits. They indicated that we would receive 200; we actually received 162. Now we believe we will receive another 100 kits today.”
Kaufman said county purchasing staff has contacted more than 400 vendors and made more than 900 contacts seeking supplies.
But vendors are either out of stock on sampling kits, or the supplies get diverted to more hard-hit areas.
“As an example, we had an order that was confirmed to deliver 1,200 swabs to us and the date for delivery was two weeks,” he said. “The day after that delivery date we received notice that the shipment would be delayed a week — and three days later we got notice that shipment would be delayed a month.”
As of the latest report, Kansas has seen 928 confirmed coronavirus cases, 134 of which have been Sedgwick County residents; 23 county residents have recovered and one died, Byrne said Wednesday morning.
Until now, the county has been submitting its test samples for analysis to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment lab.
KDHE has limited COVID-19 testing to health care workers and first responders, people 60 years and older, hospital patients and others with severe symptoms.
“As of tomorrow we are going to expand our (testing) criteria somewhat,” Byrne said. “Our contract is now ready to roll with Quest (Diagnostics) and so we’ll be testing people that have (COVID-19) symptoms and not just the strict (KDHE) criteria.”
Quest has a medical laboratory in Wichita, but the local lab has to send the test swabs out of state for analysis, which delays the results somewhat compared to the one-day turnaround the county’s been getting from KDHE.
In response to a question about turnaround time from commission Chairman Pete Meitzner, Byrne said the county ran a test with Quest and got the results back in 48 hours.
This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 11:16 AM.
