Expanding Colorado’s COVID-19 Testing Capacity Proves Frustrating to Polis, Doctors And The Public – Colorado Public Radio

The move seems to reflect a clear shift in approach after the state health department set up drive-up test centers in Denver last week. Those pop-up testing sites attracted long times of people waiting in their cars, in some cases for hours, with many not getting tested at all.

I think it does signal the fact that they are taking a more targeted approach to testing, said Glen Mays, an expert in emergency preparedness at the Colorado School of Public Health.

Mays said, with limited testing capabilities still available to the state, having a limited number of pre-selected patients seems like a reasonable response.

Mays said ideally there would be many testing sites, widely dispersed. But thats been hampered by delays in securing enough test kits, especially at the federal level.

I think clearly there's a need to, to figure out a way to ramp up testing considerably in Colorado, he said.

But with just a few sites there's a high likelihood of congestion bottlenecks and absolutely that can, can create harms in and of itself. The potential risk, he said is of creating situations for people to be, essentially, contaminating each other.

The testing also plays a key role in surveillance, giving a window into where in the state coronavirus cases have popped up.

For surveillance purposes, once you have sort of a hotspot, what you do is treat (the patients) symptomatically and assume they are infected with COVID-19. You dont need to test everybody, said May Chu, a clinical professor in epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health.

The states National Guard will be deployed in Telluride to assist with the effort.

Barron said as the days go on, officials will likely shift away from emphasizing testing, because the virus is widespread, to mitigation.

In other words, unless people are in high-risk groups, including immune-compromised or those in the health care field, they likely will not get tested because there is no treatment for coronavirus anyway.

The gates are open, everyone is out running, Barron said. Its how do we keep it from going further.

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Expanding Colorado's COVID-19 Testing Capacity Proves Frustrating to Polis, Doctors And The Public - Colorado Public Radio