San Miguel County suspends community-wide testing after processing delays
Local health officials in San Miguel County on Tuesday announced that they have halted testing residents for the new coronavirus via blood tests after the company they were working with reported “unexpected delays” in processing initial samples from residents.
The announcement came less than a month after the Telluride-based San Miguel County Department of Public Health and Environment became the agency in the state to partner with a company to use blood tests to check every resident of the southwestern Colorado county for the virus.
The agency is partnering with United Biomedical Inc.
“We will continue to evaluate whether or not it makes sense to pursue the second round of testing, given the unexpected obstacles UBI’s lab is facing,” San Miguel County Public Health Director Grace Franklin said in a statement.
Almost 6,000 San Miguel
County residents, most of the community, participated in the first round of testing. But only about 1,600 of those tests have been processed, according to a news release.
The reasons for the delays are because United Biomedical’s staff is “down 40%” and supplies needed to run the tests, including personal protection equipment, are compromised. The delays could continue because the company’s lab is in New York, which has become a national hot spot for the coronavirus pandemic. This means the refirst sults could be weeks late, according to the news release.
A representative with United Biomedical could not immediately be reached for comment. San Miguel County’s health department declined two interview requests from The Denver Post.
“We are communicating regularly and making our public health officials available to our local media to help keep our county residents informed,” county spokeswoman Susan Lilly said in an email. “We are (temporarily) declining outside media requests to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.”
San Miguel health officials announced in midMarch that they would test all of the county’s residents for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, using blood draws instead of the nasal swabs used by the state health department and hospitals.
Local public health agencies in Colorado have looked to use blood tests amid national shortages of testing supplies, saying that they can help their departments determine who in the community is immune to the disease. However, medical experts question the usefulness of the tests, which are in their infancy and search for antibodies.
San Miguel officials said United Biomedical plans to process “as many as possible tests per day” of the remaining tests, starting this week, but there are other priorities in the company’s lab that can cause more delays, according to the news release.