Lab techs provide critical information about virus
Testing for COVID-19 not possible without legion of technicians, assistants
NOTE TO READERS: As the community grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, there are those who keep other people safe and keep essential services running, including doctors and nurses, grocery store clerks and garbage collectors. These are their stories from the front line of Niagara’s battle with the novel coronavirus. Any recent discussion of COVID-19 — from understanding how many people are sick to managing the reopening of a shuttered economy — seems to turn on singular activity. Testing.
Doctors depend on lab tests to know who is infected with the novel coronavirus. Public health officials use testing as the keystone of their case management and contract tracing.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford admonished some public health units for not doing enough, while Niagara’s medical officer of health said local testing capacity is outstripping demand. Without the lab technicians and the
lab assistants who process testing samples and, in some cases, are even doing the swabs of potential COVID-19 patients, Ontario would be trying to navigate the pandemic while utterly blind.
“Without the labs, we wouldn’t know anything,” said medical lab assistant Judith Zarubiak of St. Catharines, who works for Niagara Health and Joseph Brant Hospital. “We work as a team — the lab techs and assistants, the doctors, the nurses, the environmental services. It is a whole team and, if we didn’t work together, we wouldn’t be able to take care of patients.”
Zarubiak said the public needs to know test results in Ontario aren’t just pulled out of thin air. Teams of trained health-care professionals who have to process the samples — thousand of them every day across the province — are working long hours to help doctors, nurses and public health staff grapple with the outbreaks.
And just like the medical teams laboratory staff work with, the technicians and assistants are at greater risk of exposure to the potentially deadly virus than the average person. In Niagara, health-care workers such as doctors and support staff comprise almost 22 per cent of all confirmed COVID-19 cases. Test samples can contain the live virus and if they are mishandled a laboratory professional could be exposed and infected.
Zarubiak said the risk is not limited to just the test samples. Lab personnel are often called upon to draw blood from patients — including those with confirmed cases of COVID-19.
“Remember, the patients in hospital with COVID-19 often have other medical issues that are being treated, and doctors need to run other kinds of tests,” she said. “So we’re the ones who go into the patient areas to do that.”
The risk is not any less at private labs outside hospital settings, she said. Some of those labs are doing COVID-19 testing, and the employees of those labs have to don the same protective gear as doctors and nurses at hospital testing centres.
“Even if it is not someone who you know has COVID-19, or is suspected to have it, you don’t know what is coming through the door at those labs,” Zarubiak said. “Someone might not show symptoms or don’t know they have it. So we always have to be careful.”
Under Ontario’s state of emergency rules, enacted March 17, laboratories are considered essential services. But because the people who work there are not seen as often as medical staff like doctors or paramedics, they are sometimes forgotten by the public, Zarubiak said.
“We are essential workers,” she said. “Especially now.”