Officials discourage some from testing
COVID-19 testing sites in the Memphis area have become so overwhelmed that local officials on Tuesday discouraged people from getting tests unless they fit into a high-priority category.
“Our COVID-19 labs and community testing sites are at capacity and backed up,” according to a message attributed to the area COVID-19 Joint Task Force and posted on the city government’s web site on Tuesday. “Only get tested if you are feeling sick or know you have been exposed.”
That advice is a dramatic change from a few weeks ago, when local officials were urging anyone with even the mildest symptoms to get tested. Some testing was available for people with or without symptoms.
In the past several weeks, lab turnaround times have dramatically increased in the Memphis area. A typical turnaround time in the Memphis area is now five to seven days, Alisa Haushalter, head of the Shelby County Health Department, said Tuesday. And it sometimes takes longer — even 15 to 17 days, she said.
The underlying cause appears to be a sharp increase in the number of people taking tests, a phenomenon that’s driven in part by an increased number of people experiencing symptoms. The backlog in test results has been reported at the national level, too.
And a national shortage of test supplies and reagents is now affecting Memphis-area labs, Jenny Bartlettprescott, the chief operating officer of Church Health and a leader in Memphis-area COVID-19 testing efforts, told reporters on a video conference Tuesday.
Health care experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the high-level federal disease doctor, have said that multi-day testing delays can make it virtually impossible for public health workers to perform contact tracing: the process of determining who an infected person might have exposed to the virus.
Dr. Scott Strome, executive dean of the medical school at University of Tennessee Health Science Center, agrees with that assessment.
“The only way testing stops the disease is when you can do appropriate contact tracing and everything like that,” Strome said Tuesday. “And candidly, right now, today, we’re just very, very, very far away from that goal. It can’t happen today in Memphis.”
He said UTHSC is increasing its testing capacity and says he also believes hiring more contact tracers is a good idea.
But he said because the testing system is currently overwhelmed, the only way to move forward is to reduce cases through other steps: encouraging maskwearing, hand-washing, and closing down specific businesses that serve as transmission sites.
UTHSC runs one of the major testing labs in the Memphis area. Among the other major entities running test labs are two private companies: American Esoteric Laboratories and Poplar Healthcare. Efforts to reach representatives of the companies were not immediately successful Tuesday afternoon.
Message to employers: Don’t require tests for workers
Bartlett-prescott told reporters during the Joint Task Force video conference Tuesday that local companies should modify their expectations for test results.
“In particular, we want to ask the employers of our community to please not require your employees to get tests to return to work,” she said. “That is creating additional volumes into our test sites and it also delaying people being able to return to work when they’re not able to access those tests.”
Recommendations for people waiting for test results
Strome from UTHSC recommends that anyone who experiences lengthy delays in results should contact the entity that did the test.
Test centers urge people to go into isolation after they take a test, meaning that people’s work lives and family lives are placed in limbo until results arrive. During Tuesday’s news conference, a reporter asked what people should do if they’ve been awaiting results for days.
“We’re going to follow the recommendations of the CDC with that, meaning that once you are 10 days past the onset of your symptoms and you are least three days without symptoms, you are considered free from isolation,” Bartlett-prescott said.
“That is called a symptom-based release from isolation instead of a testbased release from isolation. And that is what we are recommending at this time.”
Bartlett-prescott said local officials are asking companies to accept this type of symptom-based release from isolation. And she also reiterated that local officials are discouraging companies from requiring asymptomatic workers to take tests as a requirement to go to work.
The Centers for Disease Control says some patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms should remain in isolation longer than 10 days after the onset of symptoms, but that the 10-day limit is generally valid.
The entity’s web site says, “For most persons with COVID-19 illness, isolation and precautions can generally be discontinued 10 days after symptom onset and resolution of fever for at least 24 hours, without the use of fever-reducing medications, and with improvement of other symptoms.”
The Shelby County Health Department operates a hotline for people with questions about COVID-19. The number is 901-692-7523.