COVID-19 testing continues to plague Health Ministry
Grotto: The challenge is one of both quantity & quality
Israel faced and continues to face several challenges to increasing the number of people screened for the novel coronavirus daily, according to Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto.
Speaking Thursday, a day after the Health Ministry said it conducted 9,269 tests - down from 11,501 on April 14 and 10,401 the day before - Grotto defended the ministry. The Health Ministry has had to grow the number of coronavirus labs from one to 32, all of them working with different equipment and computer systems, he said.
Moreover, there is a global shortage of testing kits and lab supplies, which has likewise plagued Israel, he added.
“Unlike what has become acceptable thinking, the
Health Ministry believes we should do as many tests as possible and as are needed,”
Grotto told the Knesset Coronavirus Committee. “Currently, the pace is some 11,000 tests a day. The challenge is one of both quantity and quality.”
Tests are being conducted in 32 labs, and each one is unique, he said. It takes about 24 hours from the time a test is received at a given lab for it to process the test result, he added.
“There are two goals in testing: One is to find the sick, which is about 70% of all tests,” Grotto said. “The other is monitoring -- receiving an epidemiological picture of the situation, which is about 30% of tests.”
Knesset Coronavirus Committee chairman Ofer Shelah (Yesh Atid-Telem) cited a recently published Gertner Institute report that said the country has been focusing on the quantity of tests, but the issue of speed in receiving tests results has been ignored and is a big concern. The danger of a person infecting others while waiting for his or her results is high, he said at the meeting.
There were approximately 10,000 people suspected of being infected with COVID-19 whose tests have either been lost or been delayed for more than a week on their way to being processed in labs, rendering them invalid or irrelevant, Channel 12 reported earlier this week.
“The central gaps that delay knowledge of the results to the sick are the time it takes from the moment the sick person calls until he gets tested,” Grotto said, adding that the ministry is working with Magen David Adom, the organization that conducts most of the tests, to shorten the time. “The second gap is from the moment the laboratory receives the results until the person receives the result from the Health Ministry, which is in most cases 48 hours,” he said. “But there are sometimes delays because of computational and other errors.”
It takes about five days from the moment of getting infected until developing symptoms of the disease, “five days in which we do not know that he is sick, and we cannot shorten that,” Grotto said. Add to those five days the 48-hour average it takes to conduct and process the test, and it is around seven days from infection to results, he said.
To make the testing more effective under the current circumstances, the ministry has started to prioritize who is being tested, beginning with people from the high-risk population: elderly and people with preexisting medical conditions, Grotto said. Other priority populations are people who work with or who could infect weaker populations, people who have been in contact with someone who is known to have the virus, people who could infect large numbers of people or people who could infect essential populations, such as healthcare workers, he said.
The Health Ministry has instructed senior-center workers that they can only work at one institution. Moreover, it has increased testing within senior living centers. So far, 52 of the country’s deaths have been former residents of geriatric centers.
In the last few days, some 2,000 tests were being administered daily at senior centers. By Sunday, Grotto said he expected around 3,000 tests to be done daily.
“The central goal is identifying the first incidents [of the virus] and the workers who got infected,” he said.
Will the country reach 30,000 daily tests as the prime minister asserted?
Grotto said that will happen only if several changes can be made, including providing labs with more equipment, which would need to be purchased abroad and manufactured in Israel. The country must also build alternative test kits locally to compensate for the international shortage, he said.
More people would need to be hired, trained and placed in existing labs, and new laboratories would have to be approved to operate, such as those that recently launched at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University and Sheba Medical Center in