LOGGING LONG HOURS AT THE LAB
Team has processed hundreds of thousands of swabs for COVID-19
At the core of Saskatchewan's fight against the pandemic stands hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests, all of which have passed through the hands of a small team at the Roy Romanow Provincial Laboratory (RRPL).
That team was weeks into its pandemic preparations by the time most Saskatchewan residents heard the term COVID-19 for the first time.
It was mid-december 2019 when Amanda Lang began hearing about cases of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Lang, a clinical microbiologist at RRPL, watched closely for any news of the novel virus spreading.
“Near the end of January, when there started to be spread external to Wuhan, that's when I started the ball rolling in the lab here to get an assay in house and start validating so that we'd be prepared,” she said.
A laboratory diagnostic assay is a test used to detect specific pathogens, and Lang made sure RRPL had one ready to go before Saskatchewan even had its first COVID-19 case.
All this preparation meant long hours at work. From February to May, Lang said she put in an estimated 250 hours of overtime, which means an average of nearly 15 extra hours at work each week. She said others were working similar overtime, learning more about COVID-19 or ordering extra supplies like swabs.
Jessica Minion's job as the provincial clinical lead for Public Health in laboratory medicine also kicked into high gear long before COVID-19 had become a household word. She said RRPL has always had a plan for dealing with an emergency like a pandemic, but that plan needed to be quickly updated to fit the current situation.
“We would go home at the end of the day and nobody knew what we were doing. Nobody was really thinking about COVID until probably the middle of March when things started to shut down,” Minion said.
By the time the general public was feeling the impacts of the pandemic, staff at RRPL had shifted from planning to capacity building. Dozens of people from departments throughout the lab were pulled in to quickly expand RRPL'S testing capabilities.
“It was an all-hands-on-deck approach where we turned the molecular lab into basically a COVID assembly line and everybody came to help,” Minion said.
That capacity building came as the provincial government pushed for the ability to process 4,000 tests each day. More and more people began calling Healthline 811 to book a test. Drive-thru testing facilities opened in Regina and Saskatoon, and later also in Yorkton and Prince Albert. As of Friday, a total of 379,378 tests have been processed in Saskatchewan.
After each patient is swabbed, that swab is packaged up and sent to RRPL, where the sample is unpacked and brought up to the molecular diagnostics lab. There it gets prioritized by patient importance. For example, an ICU patient will receive a test result faster than an asymptomatic person not in hospital.
When it comes time for the sample to be tested, some of the liquid in the swab is extracted and put through a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, which will detect COVID-19. A result — positive, negative or indeterminate — is given, which is passed on to the physician who ordered the test and Public Health.
Lenore Howey, executive director of laboratory medicine for the Saskatchewan Health Authority, said a number of new staff were also trained to grow RRPL'S testing capacity, which has allowed the lab to keep up with the consistent high demand for tests.
“We did project of getting to that 4,000 daily target and we have been able to reach it,” Howey said. “It has been long hours, but it is also very humbling to be on a team with such great expertise across our province.”
As Minion proudly looks back on how RRPL staff have come together, she said conspiracy theories about inaccurate tests and false positives are “disheartening” for staff.
“It is very discouraging to staff in the lab who are putting in huge long hours and dedicating their lives to fighting the pandemic by helping out with diagnostics — and then to be faced online by people accusing the labs of making stuff up,” she said. “We really need their help because our workload ... is a direct result of how much the public buys into the public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19,” Minion said.