COVID-19 test result delays worsen in South Florida as surge swamps lab
As COVID-19 cases spike in South Florida, the rush for tests has clogged the system, slowing turnaround time to get results to a week or more — much longer than the 48 hours public health experts say is needed to help control the pandemic.
“Before this thing exploded, we were very close to the point where I could say with confidence that anyone in Miami-Dade County that wanted a test could get a test,” said Maurice Kemp, the deputy Miami-Dade mayor who oversees the county’s testing sites. “We’re not at that point anymore.”
The lag time has ripple effects for efforts to contain the virus, making contact tracing less accurate and potentially exposing more people to asymptomatic carriers. It also has economic impacts, taking workers away from jobs for extended periods while awaiting results.
Kemp said Miami-Dade, like other hot spots across the country, has been frustrated by a national crush on labs. Delays in results began snowballing during the COVID surge that began in June as previously sleepy testing sites were flooded with people seeking results.
“We were doing pretty well until the demand for testing just went through the roof,” he said.
In an effort to combat the delays, Florida has opened self-testing lanes for asymptomatic people at four testing sites across the state, including two in South Florida. If the experiment goes well, the state plans to expand the practice.
Jason Mahon, spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said Florida is opening self-swabbing lanes for symptomatic people at four sites by the end of the week, including the Miami Beach Convention Center and Marlins Park.
California, which is also overwhelmed with test requests, recently issued new guidelines that withhold testing from low-risk people until turnaround time drops to roughly 48 hours. Florida has not called for a similar policy, although Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state is shifting business away from labs that take longer than 48 hours to process tests.
Quest Diagnostics, the nation’s biggest testing lab, has permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to “pool” tests, a technique designed to speed up the testing process by testing batches of samples together. If the group comes out positive, each sample is individually retested. It’s used for regions or populations with low rates of the disease.
Last week, Quest said its turnaround time had slowed to seven days for non-priority patients. LabCorp, another major national testing lab, said in a statement Tuesday its average turnaround time was three to five days.
As of July 14, the average turnaround time for a test in Miami-Dade County was five days, according to county records. A county summary of wait times at government-run test sites showed delays ranging from just a day at Sherbondy Park in Opa-locka to 10 days at the Youth Fair in Tamiami Park.
Broward County’s Department of Health did not immediately answer questions about its average turnaround time, but many people tested there have complained about delays as well.
Amar Nagra, who runs a furniture manufacturing company in Miami Gardens, sent his 10-person company to get tested for COVID-19 after they were exposed to an employee with the virus. He waited in line at Hard Rock Stadium for seven hours for his swab, and on Wednesday, 13 days, later he was still waiting for the results.
“The whole factory came to a halt,” he said. “I have to abandon it, basically.”
Nagra, 48, is so frustrated with the wait he’s seeking out a second test, something many other South Floridians have turned to.
Billy Shapiro, a contractor in Broward County, has gotten tested six times since his nanny tested positive for the virus on June 29. The first, on July 2, came back a week later. He’s still waiting on the results of a July 8 test at C.B. Smith Park in Broward County.
Shapiro keeps lining up for tests because he and his family need two negative tests in a row to move on with their lives. Of the handful of results Shapiro has gotten, he’s tested positive twice, negative once and then positive again.
“I can’t go do estimates. I can’t go do walkthroughs. I haven’t been able to go into the office,” he said.
His 7-year-old daughter is supposed to get her tonsils out, but the surgery keeps getting postponed while they wait for her test results. She tested positive once, negative once, and they’re awaiting the results of her latest test.
While waiting for his results, Shapiro hesitated to call clients and friends he saw before he knew he was exposed to the virus.
“The hard part is because of the timelines and not getting tested in real-time, you don’t want to sound the alarm and freak ‘em out until you get the test results, but now you’re calling them 10 days later,” he said. “That doesn’t help anybody.”
That hesitation, and the fact that people aren’t quarantining after they get tested, is why a slow turnaround time makes it harder to contain the virus, said Dr. Eneida Roldan, CEO of FIU Health and head of the Miami-Dade testing site run by Florida International University.
“Turnaround time is key simply because it is very difficult to change human behavior. Now I have to depend on your compliance and you changing your behavior and waiting for a while. I don’t think individuals understand that if you test, you’re presumed positive. We say it, the CDC says it, but people are not listening,” she said. “Then you add on to it something we cannot control, the turnaround time, and you have an equation for disaster.”
Ditaliy Sirota, a Pennsylvania man visiting family in Miami-Dade, got tested at Hard Rock Stadium on July 3 after being exposed to a COVID-positive family member. But when his wife called Quest five days later to check on his results, the lab told her they’d just received the sample that day.
He got his negative test results back on July 12, a nine-day wait. While waiting, he also arranged for a private test through a relative’s employer and got his results back in two days, also negative.
His wife, Deenah Sirota, questioned why it took so long for the state to send her husband’s sample to Quest for processing.
“There is absolutely no reason for a five-day delay in sending the results to get processed,” she said. “I’m not sure why these sites aren’t sending them out daily.”
In response, Mahon said samples are sent from testing sites to labs at the end of the day, every day.
The lag in results has frustrated the county’s efforts to ramp up testing in neighborhoods where COVID saw its first summer spikes. The testing site at Amelia Earhart Park in the Hialeah area reported about 35 percent of its tests were coming back positive during the week between July 3 and July 10.
A mobile testing center set up in the garage of the Caleb Center in the Brownsville neighborhood of Miami is seeing about 27 percent of its tests coming in positive. The county did not have estimated wait times for Caleb.
“It’s a steady day,” Tracy McGill, a county fire captain, said on a recent Friday morning in the Caleb garage as about 50 people waited in line for a chance to have a nostril swabbed for COVID.
When it opened in June, the site was performing less than 100 tests a day. Now it can see up to 400 people come through the garage daily. Delayed results often mean delayed paychecks, too. “Some need to go back to work,” McGill said. “They need two negatives to go back.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
