Sedgwick County plans to invest in COVID-19 spit tests, partner with WSU

Sedgwick County is moving forward with plans to buy COVID-19 saliva tests, a move commissioners said could make it easier to test children when school starts.

The Sedgwick County Commission directed staff to work out a contract with Clinical Reference Laboratory, a Lenexa, Kan.-based company that was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration to test samples taken at home.

With saliva testing, children could spit in a vial rather than have a nasal swab shoved up their noses.

The move is seen by county officials as a major step for a region that has lagged the rest of the nation in testing throughout the coronavirus pandemic. The advantages of spit tests are that they are less invasive, quicker and less expensive. But they’re not as reliable as the nasal swab tests and aren’t recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization.

“It’s no secret that Sedgwick County, the state of Kansas and the country, honestly, has been struggling with COVID testing from the time of the outbreak of the pandemic,” County Manager Tom Stolz said. “On a local level, we struggled with the ability to obtain commodity to run testing. When we finally got commodity it seemed like we ran into a lack of capacity problem and slowness.”

Stolz said the County Health Department wasn’t prepared to do mass testing during a large-scale pandemic.

“Our health department from the onset of the pandemic, we had a little bit of an identity crisis when all of the sudden we had a pandemic hit in March,” he said. “Mass sampling for a particular disease is not something the health department has ever done before. So what we’re doing now is a paradigm shift of what our health department is used to doing.”

Rather than bolster the Health Department’s own testing capacity, the County Commission moved Thursday to order tests from a Lenexa-based lab and to reimburse Wichita State University $1.5 million for lab equipment at the state school.

Elizabeth Ablah, professor in the Department of Population Health at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita, has been working with the county to bolster its testing capacity. She said the Lenexa company can turn around results within three days and is a good short-term solution to the county’s testing problems until a deal can be worked out for a local lab.

Right now, Sedgwick County tests roughly one-third as many people as it should to contain the virus, Ablah said.

Around 800 people are tested in Sedgwick County each day, including 230 by the Health Department. That number should be 2,234, Ablah said.

The Clinical Reference Laboratory should be able to help reach that number, although collecting that many samples could be a challenge because of a lack of staffing at the county, she said. Contacting people who have tested positive would also pose a challenge to the county.

“The Sedgwick County Health Department’s capacity to contact the positives and conduct the disease investigations is currently limited,” she said.

The lab charges the county $50 a test if doing mass spit testing of asymptomatic people and $90 a test for symptomatic spit tests. At-home tests would cost about $25 more, Ablah said.

The Clinical Reference Laboratory proposal was a last-minute addition for consideration by the county, which had received proposals from Wichita State and Ascension Via Christi.

Under the Wichita State proposal, the county would have paid the school $6 million in CARES Act funding for 100,000 tests and to help pay for the testing equipment. Ascension Via Christi asked for $7.6 million for 100,000 tests and three analyzers.

In anticipation of winning the contract, Wichita State ordered around $1.5 million in equipment, said John Tomblin, senior vice president at Wichita State and executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research.

“I’ve already laid out a million and a half dollars,” Tomblin said. “And the university is struggling right now with COVID as well.”

Tomblin and Andy Schlapp, a former lobbyist for the county and executive director of governmental relations at Wichita State, pressed commissioners to approve a $6 million deal with the school Thursday, paying all of the money up front.

But concerns over spending so much at once and whether it was eligible under the federal CARES Act stalled a decision. Instead, the County Commission voted unanimously to pay for the equipment WSU has already purchased and continue working on a future partnership.

“I went out on good faith,” Tomblin said. “I’m asking the commission to go out on good faith back with me to build this capability.”

The move to contract with Clinical Reference Laboratory came after it was apparent neither Wichita State nor Ascension Via Christi would be able to increase testing capacity until mid-October at the earliest.

Tomblin said Wichita State offers a long-term solution to the county’s testing woes.

“I’m talking about building a capacity,” Tomblin said. “This thing is not going to go away. I mean, we’re still going to be talking about this next summer. We’re still going to be talking about this next fall. ... It’s essential to keeping our factories open and our schools in line.”

This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 5:00 PM.