COVID-19 results from the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) are taking at least a week to reach patients, while private sector tests are now taking up 72 hours, reports Groundup.
Two Cape Town doctors have independently spoken out about the fact that that COVID-19 results from the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) are taking at least a week to reach patients, reports Groundup. Private sector tests are now taking up to 72 hours. One of the doctors, who works in a public sector hospital, said that there is a backlog of about 10,000 COVID-19 tests at the Green Point NHLS facility in Cape Town. The doctors said that the delay in test results makes the contact tracing process a lot more difficult.
“The utility of the community screening and testing is close to zero now but continues to be pushed by the Health Department. It’s causing huge delays in test results for hospitalised patients. So, this strategy is actually impairing service delivery,” said one of the doctors. “Completely insane,” he said.
The report says Western Cape Premier Alan Winde has also written to President Cyril Ramaphosa expressing concern over the delayed tests. “Policy decisions, such as the decision by the Labour Department that a person must test negative before being allowed to return to work and other government departments requesting testing for their staff members, place additional strain on the system and further compound the problem,” he wrote on Twitter.
Western Cape Health spokesperson Mark Van der Heever said that the backlog is national. “As the Western Cape, and other provinces, ramp up testing, they are finding it challenging to keep up and process these tests, resulting in a nationwide backlog in the results,” said Van der Heever. Once a person tests positive, the Health Department immediately identifies their contacts and screens and tests them, after which they have to be quarantined or self-isolated. “The delay in results delays this process and puts pressure on these systems when results are released in larger batches as they process the backlogs,” Van der Heever explained.
Nationally there have been about 10,000 COVID-19 tests per day over the past week, according to updates by the NHLS. The number of tests conducted has also been steadily rising. But a test is presumably only counted once the final result is processed, which could have been a week or more ago.
The report quotes the NHLS as saying: “The past week has been a challenging one … in that the test kits ordered could not be delivered due to logistical challenges that were outside of the suppliers’ control. There were further delays in transporting the supplies due to the lockdown, flight cancellations and the long weekends. Due to global shortages, suppliers did not have enough stock to supply the NHLS with the numbers it has ordered. Coupled with a massive surge in testing from certain provinces, this has meant that the demand exceeds the supply. The NHLS has put in steps in place to meet the demand, and these will impact on the turnaround.
“The NHLS has been working together with its academic partners and private laboratories to conduct tests as quickly as possible. Over the last two days, some supplies have arrived and been distributed to our laboratories. We are working together with our suppliers towards increasing the numbers of supplies into the country and ensure a steady flow of regular supplies.”
Western Cape Health has been forced to turn to the private sector for COVID-19 tests, as the state laboratory service scrambles to keep pace with growing demand. Business Day reports that the delays experienced by the province not only threaten to push up costs but have exposed the constraints facing the NHLS, which cannot source enough imported kits to meet its national target of 36,000 tests a day it had set for end-April.
The Western Cape accounts for almost half of South Africa’s confirmed cases of 8,232 and has rapidly increased testing in the past fortnight – to an average of 1,600 a day – as part of its efforts to slow transmission of the disease. It is now experiencing sustained community transmission of COVID-19, with cases doubling every eight days, Western Cape premier Alan Winde said.
Western Cape Health head Keith Cloete said: "The scale-up of testing in the last two weeks was of such a steep nature it exceeded NHLS capacity to keep up." The delays have hobbled the department’s ability to manage confirmed cases, and to trace, screen and test their contacts, so that it has begun using private laboratories to lighten the load on the NHLS, he said.
It is not clear at this stage whether the Western Cape will be able to negotiate a volume discount with private laboratories, which charge at least double the rate levied by the NHLS.
The premier and Western Cape Health MEC, Nomafrench Mbombo, had raised their concerns about NHLS delays with President Ramaphosa and health minister Zweli Mkhize, Winde said. The NHLS declined to indicate the maximum number of tests it can perform per day, saying only that it had processed over 54,000 tests in the week to 2 May, a quarter of which were from the Western Cape.
[link url="https://www.groundup.org.za/article/huge-delays-covid-19-test-results/"]Full Groundup[/link]
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