Why are some Centre County residents waiting weeks for COVID-19 test results?
Centre County residents are finding out that getting tested for COVID-19 is getting easier; the hard part is getting timely results.
Wanting to get tested for the coronavirus before visiting a loved one with cancer, Kimberly Del Bright and her husband scheduled an appointment for 12:30 p.m. July 13 at Mount Nittany Medical Center.
As of noon Thursday, they still had not received their results and had no idea when to expect them.
“Your COVID test result is still pending. We are checking for results several times per day and will let you know once they are received,” a Mount Nittany Health representative wrote to Del Bright Thursday in a note shared with the CDT. “It’s taking at least 14 days to get results, but at this point, the lab that is processing results is no longer providing us with a time frame for results when we call to follow-up.”
In the early months of the pandemic, availability of testing posed a significant problem. Since then, the United States has enhanced its testing capacity — conducting nearly 15 million last month. But as cases surge across the country, the demand for testing has increased and left many waiting in what has been described as a new crisis.
Del Bright and her husband said they had been cautious throughout the pandemic; their decision to get tested was to ensure they wouldn’t pose a threat to immunocompromised family members.
But Del Bright — a Penn State faculty member — worries the backlog will only worsen once the university reopens this fall.
During a recent press conference, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said national companies like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp — which are processing many Pennsylvania samples — are “inundated” and could take more than a week to return results.
When State College resident Hammadi Khelifi started showing symptoms of COVID-19 after returning from a trip to Florida, he scheduled a testing appointment on July 1 at Mount Nittany Medical Center.
He received his results 18 days later, but while he waited, Khelifi treated his life as if he was infected by isolating himself from his roommates and self-quarantining.
While he was relieved when his test came back negative, the anxiety of waiting over two weeks felt worse than his initial symptoms.
“It’s weird, but the anxiety was worse than having COVID-19 itself,” he said. “It was the pressure of having it.”
Approximately 5,000 COVID-19 tests have been performed system-wide at Mount Nittany Health since mid-March, according to Chief Medical Officer Dr. Nirmal Joshi.
In an email last week, Joshi wrote that the health system is aware of the long wait time for results and made recent changes in response.
During the week, the health system collects an average of 92 test samples per day and 12 per day over the weekend, Joshi said. Once collected, the samples are sent to a commercial lab for testing.
“Since mid-March, the average wait time has been one to two days; however, some commercial laboratories experience a backlog in testing, which results in a long wait for our patients,” Joshi wrote in an email Wednesday. “To provide the best possible care for our patients and the community, this wait time has led to a change in where we send test collection samples, with current turnaround time of one to two days.”
He did not indicate where test collection samples are now sent to or when the change took place.
More than 7,000 people have tested negative for COVID-19 in Centre County, according to the state Department of Health. In addition to the hospital and other local health care facilities, other places where residents can be tested include a site at the Walmart on North Atherton Street, where tests are processed through Quest.
This story was originally published July 25, 2020 at 1:51 PM.
