San Antonians still waiting days to get COVID test results
Weeks after a San Antonio nonprofit opened six new COVID-19 testing sites expected to deliver results in a day, the wait has stretched to at least 72 hours.
“Right now, we are experiencing delays — whether it’s accessing the supplies or making sure the labs are able to turn around the results,” Claude Jacob, Metropolitan Health District director, told City Council members in a recent COVID-19 update.
The city announced a contract last month with the San Antonio-based nonprofit Community Labs, which has advertised its quick turnaround time to receive results from a PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, test for COVID-19, which is more sensitive than rapid tests.
But Jacob said people should expect to wait at least three or four days to receive their test results.
District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval said she’s heard from some residents who have waited at least five days to know whether they were positive for COVID-19.
Turnaround times will improve over the next couple of days, said Sal Webber, president of Community Labs.
“Over the weekend, we cleared the backlog of results in our lab, but in an abundance of caution, we’re going to continue to say 72 hours for the next couple of days,” Webber said.
Webber attributed the delays to a combination of issues. The organization’s own lab staff members have contracted COVID-19 and had to stay home.
The high rate of tests coming back positive also affects how quickly the nonprofit can test samples. To save time, samples from several people are tested in one batch through a pooling process. If the result is positive, each sample must be tested individually to determine which one is positive.
Pooling increases capacity, Webber said, but it is ineffective when positivity rates are so high because all samples must be tested individually.
Metro Health reported the county’s positivity rate Tuesday as 39.4 percent. But Webber said the rate is higher than 50 percent at Community Labs’ public locations and about 20 percent at the nonprofit’s school testing sites.
Before the surge in cases from the omicron variant, schools typically saw a positivity rate below 1 percent, Webber said.
He called the positivity rate “extraordinary.”
“We’ve (been) testing since September 2020, and we’ve never seen these incredibly high positivity rates,” he said. “Like everyone, we’re hoping the positivity rate peaks soon. When it drops below 20 percent, we can resume pooling samples, which will increase lab capacity.”
Metro Health also reported Tuesday a seven-day average of 5,540 new COVID-19 cases, down from 6,140 a week ago.
Demand for COVID-19 tests has doubled since Community Labs opened its new locations this month.
Jacob compared the situation to a long checkout line at H-E-B during the holidays, when companies usually add extra staffing to deal with an expected increase in customers. He said San Antonio added capacity by contracting with
Community Labs to increase the number of testing sites across the city.
“It’s not just one site or one problem,” Jacob said.
In response, Community Labs has increased its staffing and added what Webber called key instruments in the lab to speed processing.
“We are confident in our ability to deliver results within 72 hours and are making progress to returning to our standard 24-hour turnaround time,” Webber said.
The first week Community Labs opened public testing locations in partnership with the city, a specific delivery issue caused delays. Because of bad weather and staff shortages, Fedex failed to deliver some key lab components. That complication has since been resolved, Webber said, even as other problems have persisted.
For a complete list of testing sites and vaccine popup clinics, visit covid19.sanantonio.gov or call 311 and select option 8.