The 711th Human Performance Wing’s Epidemiology Laboratory, or also called the Epi Lab, offers clinical diagnostic, public health, and force health screening testing for DoD employees and families throughout the country.
“Well done, Epi Lab,” Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Lab, said Friday during a virtual town hall meeting.
“At the beginning of 2020, who would have thought they could have processed such a volume at that rate?” Pringle said.
“Truly an amazing feat,” the one-star general added.
Pringle said the lab is instrumental in understanding who has got the virus, who does not, as well as helping with other missions by the Air Force.
As of mid-September, the lab had tested 120,648 SARS-CoV-2 specimens since March. The mean turnaround time for testing then was 19.1 hours, a Wright-Patterson spokesman said at the time.
“No other lab in the department even comes close to their daily production or their daily test samples,” Pringle said in September. “It’s up to 4,000 samples a day, and they’re running operations seven days a week.”
At another point in Friday’s town hall, a questioner on social media asked about the prospect of AFRL employees returning to their offices. Many AFRL and Wright-Patterson employees have been working from home or elsewhere during the pandemic.
“We are not rushing to get back into the building,” Pringle said. “That is first and foremost. I do see a lot of tele-work continuing.”
She also said AFRL does not yet have precise guidance on receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, but she expected an update “any minute.”
“It will probably be next week, but we can’t expect it to have all the answers at the get-go,” Pringle said in response to the vaccine question. “We know it’s going to take time to get out all the particulars, to figure out how this is going to be distributed, how the priorities are going to be set.”
“We know when it’s implemented, it will be a safe one,” she added.
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