Harris Health turns to private firm for tests

The Harris Health System is switching to a private North Carolina diagnostic company to test suspected coronavirus cases instead of the Houston Health Department, a circumvention of the government laboratory’s more rigid criteria.

In an email to staffers Thursday night, the Harris County safety-net hospital network said LabCorp is now its primary testing site for COVID-19,

the viral illness currently spreading in the Houston region. The decision follows national and local criticism of the lack of testing being done by government labs operating under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rules.

“All tests will now be conducted at the attending physician’s discretion rather than adhering to the CDC’s recommended guidelines,” says the email.

The system will sacrifice speed for the greater discretion. Whereas the Houston health department typically turns around results within 24 hours, the new testing will take at least a few days — doctors must send patient specimens by overnight mail and wait two to four days for results.

But doctors will be freed of CDC criteria that required testing only be done on people with certain respiratory symptoms who’ve also had direct person-to-person contact with someone infected or who’d recently traveled to an area where there’s been community spread. Though a spokesman for the Houston health department Thursday said “everyone who needs to be tested is being tested,” a number of doctors told the Chronicle this week they want to test more patients who appeared likely to be infected but are hamstrung by the criteria.

“I am so pleased we can test (more people) and really hope the same thing happens in communities across the country as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Harris Health’s Ben Taub Hospital and a professor of emergency medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Dark had said Thursday that more testing needs to be done in order to find the “true prevalence of the disease” and “true fatality rate.”

Frustration over the issue boiled over on Capitol Hill this week as both Republican and Democratic members of Congress demanded to know why the U.S.

wasn’t testing as fast as some other countries. More than 190,000 people in South Korea have been tested since the country reported its first coronavirus case Jan. 21, for instance, compared to fewer than 10,000 in the U.S. since its first positive test the same day.

The amount of testing in Texas had been a mystery — neither the state nor Houston health departments would divulge the number — but Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that 220 Texans have been tested, either by a state health department lab or the CDC, and that another 75 Texans are undergoing testing.

Abbott said that the state's daily testing capacity is 272 people and that the amount will expand into the thousands next week.

Houston health department spokesman Porfirio Villarreal said the city lab has the capacity to treat 600 patients, not daily but over as long a period as that takes. At that point, the city would either request new testing equipment from the CDC or send specimens to the Texas health department for testing.

Eight Texas health departments last week became verified to conduct testing.

LabCorp made its COVID-19 testing available to doctors and hospitals March 5 and began receiving specimens the next day, according to a company press release. The release says the company is now able to perform several thousand tests per day and is adding new equipment and staff to create additional capacity.

Harris Health, which includes Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital and more than 30 centers and clinics as well as Ben Taub, already had been utilizing LabCorp for some of its COVID-19 testing. In the coming weeks, the system will explore other options for testing for more capacity and speed as well, said a Harris Health spokesman.

There are now more than 2,700 COVID-19 cases in the U.S., including 53 in Texas and 27 in the Houston area. The disease, which can progress to pneumonia, has killed more than 5,000 people globally, mostly the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions. Most people recover, and there have been no deaths in Texas yet.

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was canceled Wednesday after testing showed a Montgomery County man who had attended its barbecue cookoff event tested positive for the coronavirus. Because the man had not recently traveled to an outbreak area, it was determined that his positive test marked the first community transmission of the virus.

Abbott on Friday declared a statewide public health disaster over the coronavirus pandemic, the 35th state to do so. He said the state will ramp up testing, beginning Friday, with the state’s first drive-thru with testing capabilities in San Antonio. He said Dallas, Houston and Austin should expect similar testing sites to open in coming weeks.