A scene from the early months of the pandemic: a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site at Prevea Health in Ashwaubenon in July of 2020. (PHOTO: WTAQ News)
BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ) – Testing for COVID-19 has apparently been going fairly well in Wisconsin, despite some frustrations for medical professionals working to administer and record those tests.
Wisconsin is generally taking care of its own when it comes to coronavirus testing. A good chunk of tests are checked by labs in Madison, like Exact Sciences – which received a partnership with the state to conduct the tests. That leaves Wisconsin in a generally better position than most other states.
“We’re 24-72 hours here, and sometimes it’s longer. Sometimes a delay has a lot to do with a specimen that was collected and didn’t register well on the machine, and we had to re-run it. Sometimes people don’t have the right phone number or contact info, that happened to us a lot during the county testing,” says Prevea Health CEO Dr. Ashok Rai, “We’re kind of living week by week. Supplies right now, everything from reagents to the little pipette tips that go inside the machine, are in shortage around the world. So you’re scrambling every week to make sure you have enough to take you through the next week.”
But luckily, local Wisconsin companies are able to produce and provide the reagents required to run the tests.
As for the issue of delayed results – Rai says Brown County hasn’t seen too many significant issues of relaying whether someone tested positive or negative.
“The way ours works, the negatives are actually auto-resulted to the patient on the phone or on their online accounts, so we don’t bother calling them. Some people have to manually process and enter in all of that negative information. We’ve automated that here for most of the systems,” Rai tells the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl.
Brown County is among just three Wisconsin counties seeing a shrinking coronavirus trend. Most Northeast Wisconsin counties have high burdens and high virus activity. Florence County is listed as low in both categories, with nobody reporting symptoms or testing positive in three weeks. Door, Kewaunee and Shawano counties have moderately high burdens and high activity.
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