Washington Governor Jay Inslee says the state will only be able to move away from coronavirus-related restrictions if it can improve in two areas: testing and contact tracing.
In the case of testing, the governor’s directive to test more people for Covid-19 has set in motion a big logistical project.
Spokane County Health Officer Bob Lutz says the Washington Department of Health has ordered as many as two million Covid test kits.
“They were getting specimen kits in the hundreds and thousands. Now they’re getting them in in the ten thousands. They actually have a National Guard unit that’s dedicated to just putting all these materials together and packaging them and getting them out," he said.
Lutz says he has ordered a thousand for the county’s mobile testing clinic at the Fairgrounds and a proposed second site in Airway Heights.
But he says the state is still waiting on hundreds of thousands more, which adds a layer of complication to his plans to expand testing.
“I have more people out there that could be testing positive if I had the resources. I will have and build the capacity, but the other issue, for me, is the fact we end up sending, with some exceptions, almost all the test materials over to the west side for analysis. That’s a delay," Lutz said.
He wants faster test results so that people who have the virus can be identified and directed into isolation sooner, before they can infect others. But he says the system isn’t there yet.
“We’ve got some basic structures in place, some basic infrastructure, but we need to build a lot more upon what we have to make this a coordinated, cohesive system going forward," he said.
Governor Inslee says Washington hopes to build its infrastructure to process about 22,000 tests a day, about a five-fold increase from the current pace. But he says the state needs to be able to procure even more supplies from other sources, including the federal government.
Besides testing, Spokane County health officials are also working through the details of creating an expanded contact tracing program for people who test positive for the coronavirus.
Inslee says the state is pulling together a team of up to 2,000 people to do the laborious work of finding and notifying people who have been exposed to the virus.
This is work Spokane County Health District epidemiologists have already been doing. The question now, says Lutz, is whether the routine will change.
“If we get a positive test result, then our team will determine if that’s a situation that would be best served by having one of my epidemiologists work with it, versus this is a case that maybe we could have a volunteer that’s been trained through a process to take on and look at," Lutz said.
Inslee says the state will bring on as many as 700 National Guard members to do this task. Lutz has suggested reaching out to medical students who may be at home this spring, doing distance learning. They hope to have the expanded contact tracing program in place in the next 10 days or so.