Louisiana’s COVID-19 testing has hit another hurdle with the turnaround time on getting results. Early in the pandemic, there was a lack of nasal swabs to conduct tests, but now Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Alex Billioux says some labs are struggling with the supply chain for the reagents needed to get results.
“What we are doing to try to manage that is really advocate strongly with the federal government to get more reagents to us and then to shuttle the specimens around the state to those labs that have shorter turnaround times,” said Billioux.
Billioux says the timeliness in getting a result makes the difference in being useful data in stopping the spread and just adding numbers to the stats.
“We need three days to get results or better. Where we are seeing five to seven days, that’s really challenging, and ten to fourteen days is probably not useful,” said Billioux.
Billioux says the strain put onto the state’s testing capabilities could soon have an impact on who is eligible to be swabbed at community testing sites.
“If you have no symptoms, you had no contact with anybody who has ever had COVID, or even recently had COVID, we are probably going to start turning you away from our community-based testing sites, so those walk-up and drive-up testing sites,” said Billioux.
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