School COVID testing updates
/With school now in full gear (and full time), there has been a huge increase throughout the county in doctor’s visits for COVID tests to return to school. This has led to several issues you should be aware of that are affecting both Panorama Pediatrics and all other offices in the area:
A valid school test must be a PCR (not antigen) test. Though we now have the machine at the office to run these in 45 minutes or so, the testing cartridges are in short supply. Our usual shipments of 200 tests have now been cut down to 50. For comparison, several days last week we did 60-70 tests in a day. Most other urgent cares or offices that also do this use the same platform we do, so are facing the same shortages.
When out of cartridges, we (and other offices) then have to send the swabs to the Strong Hospital lab, which has resulted in backlogs there and results taking 3-4 days (or more) at times.
To add insult to injury, the Rochester RHIO, which is the electronic pipeline through which we receive all of our lab results from Strong, went down last week and is still down, so our staff has been looking up all results manually (for those tests we send to Strong when we don’t have testing cartridges). This unfortunately is slower and more time-consuming.
Furthermore, we know that the head of county health department was on the news last week reporting that children with mild symptoms may be able to just get a test and not see a doctor, but this was not finalized by the State DOH and DOE when he said this (and still is not). So there may be changes coming this week, which would be great news, but for now the rules stand as they have been.
We are running over capacity to see as many of these children as we can, but as you can see much of this is out of our control. We thank you for your patience, and hope that there will be some changes in the school protocols coming that will ease some of this backlog we are facing.
