Sedgwick County’s coronavirus testing won’t be as fast as announced
Sedgwick County health authorities have backed away from an earlier statement that private labs in Wichita would be able to speed the process of testing Wichita-area patients for the coronavirus known as COVID-19.
On Wednesday, county Health Director Adrienne Byrne said two national clinical-testing companies with local labs, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, had been authorized by federal health agencies to process tests for the virus. That, she said, could cut the turnaround time on COVID-19 tests compared to the current practice of sending samples to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in Topeka for analysis.
However, it was later learned that the test samples provided to the private labs could not actually be processed in Wichita, but would have to be packaged locally and shipped to Quest and LabCorp facilities out of state.
The turnaround time to do that would actually be three to four days, longer than KDHE’s current turnaround time of approximately 24 hours, said Chris Steward, the county’s deputy health director.
The actual processing of a test sample takes about four hours, Steward said. Tests from Sedgwick County are being sent to the KDHE lab by courier in the evening and results are usually reported the next day, she said.
At present, COVID-19 tests are limited to patients with particular risk factors such as recent overseas travel to certain countries or known exposure to someone who has been confirmed as having the virus.
Similar to many respiratory infections, symptoms of COVID-19 include fever, coughing and shortness of breath. Persons with those symptoms are being asked to contact their health-care provider by phone for advice on precautions against spreading sickness before coming to the medical office.
The severity of symptoms varies widely, with older people and persons with compromised immune systems at the highest risk.
Persons under investigation for COVID-19 who are well enough are sent home and told to stay there until their test results come in. Only those with severe symptoms will be kept in a hospital setting, Steward said.
Sedgwick County has not had a confirmed case of coronavirus as of yet, Steward said Thursday. Friday morning Wesley Medical Center announced that it had a patient who is presumptive positive for COVID-19.
Byrne said Wednesday that to avoid confusion in the public, the county will not be reporting how many persons are under investigation for infection with the virus, nor the number of COVID-19 tests that come back negative.
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 4:51 AM.
