⏩ Testing ramping up:
With cases surging, sites and labs that had been winding down are adding staff and hours.
With demand for coronavirus testing once again surging in the Bay Area, local health officials are gearing up to add staff and hours at testing sites and labs — reversing course on what had been a gradual winddown of many testing operations.
The renewed demand for testing comes as new cases, mostly among unvaccinated residents, continue their steep climb in the region and nation. Statewide and in several Bay Area counties, daily testing plummeted between January and late June, but began ticking back up in early July. The rise started around the time new cases began increasing after the June 15 reopening of California’s economy, and the highly transmissible delta variant took hold as the dominant strain.
In San Francisco, testing peaked in late December with roughly 9,400 tests conducted each day. That declined steadily over the next several months, reaching a low of about 2,600 in early July, according to city data. Since then, testing has ratcheted back up, reaching about 4,500 a day on July 25, the most recent date for which data was available.
“We’re definitely seeing an increase in demand for testing,” Sonoma County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said during a press briefing Monday. “We’re talking to our lab, a regional lab, about going back to weekend staffing and running tests on the weekends so we don’t have a lag.”
Health officers for several other Bay Area counties echoed Mase and are taking similar steps to boost testing and lab capacity in a bid to avoid repeating the testing delays that plagued the early months of the pandemic. At that time,
many people had to wait days for a test and more than a week to get their results back. That’s no longer the case, state data indicates: The average turnaround time for test results in California is one day, for the week of July 1824.
Welcoming the lull in new cases in June, many local health departments scaled back on testing because demand was so low. San Francisco, for example, closed its large public testing site at the Embarcadero. Now, some are reversing those plans.
“We’ve decided not to scale back testing sites we’d considered scaling back,” said Contra Costa County Health Officer Dr. Chris Farnitano. “As demand changes we are going to consider opening additional sites or hours to keep up with testing demand.”
The renewed demand for testing is likely due to several factors. With the delta variant being so contagious and nearly half of Californians still not fully vaccinated, more unvaccinated people are falling ill and seeking testing. Their close contacts also have to get tested as part of the contact tracing process.
And, with breakthrough cases becoming increasingly common among the fully vaccinated, more vaccinated people are coming down with symptoms and getting tested to confirm whether they’ve been infected with the coronavirus.
“So far we’ve been able to absorb that demand,” said Dr. Nicholas Moss, health officer for Alameda County, where daily tests are up 50% compared with late June. “We’ll continue to evaluate and make sure people can get tests when they need it.”