The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
700,000 tests reported this month
Connecticut will exceed 700,000 coronavirus tests performed in October, making up 30 percent of all the tests performed since the start of the pandemic and nearly double the number of tests in September.
With a second wave beginning, the state could do many more tests in the months to come.
“There’s not a top number right now, as the picture of our resources is constantly changing, but we can say with confidence that we’re not near our capacity,” said Lora Rae Anderson, a spokesperson for the state Office of the Chief Operating Officer.
As of Friday evening, there have been 2,284,896 coronavirus tests in Connecticut, according to state data, an average of more than 23,000 every day in the month of October.
Compare that to March, when there were a total of 15,600 tests the entire month, an average of 500 each day.
At the start of the pandemic, testing was limited to the state lab, and there was only a single test kit, capable of testing a total of 500 patients. Gov. Ned Lamont was compelled to
send a letter to the CDC requesting more tests.
“I respectfully request the ability to access additional testing kits to support the heightened demand for COVID-19 testing in Connecticut,” Lamont said in a March 5 letter.
Since then, testing has been farmed out to doctors’ offices and pharmacies, allowing for many more tests.
“Those who conduct testing through their labs procure their own test kits — they don’t come from the state at this point,” Anderson said. “However, test kits are a part of the state’s stockpile, so, much like PPE, we’re prepared in the case there are shortages of test kits.”
Some testing sites have seen demand exceed capacity. In Norwalk, residents seeking COVID tests were turned away.
But Anderson said those were “isolated incidents and not a visual of the state’s availability of test kits.”
“We have contracted with a number of labs, which gives us the flexibility to shift resources if need be — as we have done when we see outbreaks or issues in a certain area,” she said.
Pedro Mendes, of UConn Health’s Center for Quantitative Medicine, said the increase in tests makes estimations of the current — and future — spread of the pandemic all the more accurate.
The state has been using the percentage of tests that are positive as a metric by which the pandemic is gauged, and the more tests the better.
“This is an accurate estimate of how much spread is prevalent in the population when you test very large numbers,” he said by email. “This is particularly true when the number of tests is large, which is the case here.”
In April, when there were an average of 3,238 tests per day — and 81,533 tests the entire month — as many as 30 percent of them were positive, though it likely was not an accurate representation of viral spread.
“Back then we were likely getting a lower rate than we would have if we had tested more broadly,” Mendes said. “When you test in large numbers and there is spread in the population you will get large percent positivity. The real problem with this metric is if you don’t test in large numbers, because then you could just be missing the cases and you may have just sampled a pocket of the population which happens to not have been infected yet.”