Although a vaccine is on the way, testing remains a vital tool to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
“Widespread detection guarantees that people know their results and quarantine, keeping the infection from spreading,” said Dr. Ronald Chiu, CompuNet’s medical director.
On March 17, CompuNet partnered with Premier Health’s Fidelity Health Care and the University of Dayton to open one of the nation’s longest-running drive-thru testing sites at UD Arena. The location served more than 25,000 people, including individuals traveling from as far as Michigan and West Virginia, before relocating to onMain, the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
“It was absolutely critical to minimize the number of patients with COVID-19-like symptoms who were coming into physician offices, hospitals, and other health care settings to seek testing,” Teresa Williams, chief operating officer of CompuNet, said in a press release.
CompuNet has expanded to eleven testing sites: five drive-thru locations and six patient service centers. The lab conducts more than 1,000 coronavirus tests each day, Chiu said. The lab has come a long way from the early days of the pandemic when it could only administer 100 to 200 tests per week.
“There were some tests (in March) which were not very good; the sensitivity, specificity were not that good,” he said. “Turnaround times were not that good. We used to struggle with sending our specimens to the Department of Health and get our results two weeks later.”
According to CompuNet, its current turnaround time for a COVID test is between 48 and 72 hours. This progress was made possible by Premier Health’s investment in more testing equipment and the hiring of 40 additional employees, bringing CompuNet’s total staff to about 875. More accurate COVID tests have also been developed since March and needed supplies that were scarce then are now more readily available.
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