Deputy Health Officer Dr. Ennis talks Covid-19 testing turnaround time, reports of lost tests

HUMBOLDT COUNTY, Calif. (KIEM) — Some residents are reporting turnaround times of a week or more for Covid-19 tests at Redwood Acres with some waiting that long only to be asked to be retested, and others saying their tests were lost.

Public health doesn’t have a clear answer as to why that’s happening. Deputy Health Officer Dr. Josh Ennis said, “We followed up with Optum Serve in regards to it and they were unable to give a good explanation for why it is occurring, so we do not have a good answer as to why.”

As far as lost tests, Dr. Ennis says the few people they were able to follow up with received their results a couple of days after originally being told it may have been lost.

The reason for longer turnaround times is two-fold. Demand for the Optum Serve test site has gone up, and their lab has seen an increase in test volume resulting in a back log. Staffing issues have also prompted concern with Public Health trying to alleviate that by staffing the site with local healthcare workers. Dr. Ennis reminds the community that with every positive case, there’s likely more cases across the county, and that’s for a number of reasons.

“It’s because of distances involved and people are not going to seek testing for that reason. There are probably people that are very mildly symptomatic, or asymptomatic altogether, so they think it’s not required to get tested. Finally, the antibody data that we have suggests that we’re only picking up maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 cases,” Ennis says.