Brad Little hosted a press conference Friday about Idaho’s new COVID-19 testing methods. Little was joined by two Idaho Department of Health and Welfare employees; Bureau of Laboratories Chief and Laboratory Manager Christopher Ball and Public Health Administrator Elke Shaw-Tulloch.
“We think of the virus as a spark that can be triggered by manmade or natural causes that we want to quickly put out by tossing a blanket on it,” Shaw-Tulloch said. “The spark is the virus and the blanket is our epidemiological investigations and contact tracing. The fire can have an increased chance of exploding into a wildfire with every spark that is unsuccessfully extinguished or gets flamed into an area that does not have sufficient fire breaks.”
Testing serves as a method for finding sparks and fires in this analogy, Shaw-Tulloch said, and when used in combination with contact tracing, social distancing and proper hygiene, can make an impact on flattening the curve.
Little said about a month ago, he created a task force to create a new strategy for COVID-19 testing across Idaho. The task force helped set criteria for who should be tested at what time.
“We estimated that our testing capacity in early May was approximately 7,500 tests per week,” Ball said. “Further, we projected that if our supply chains continued to improve and we don’t encounter any new or unexpected barriers, that our maximum capacity could be almost 23,000 tests per week. These estimates include both work performed in Idaho laboratories and from out-of-state commercial reference laboratories.”
Ball said the state plans to increase testing using five priority levels including both symptomatic and asymptomatic people.
The highest level of priority, level one, includes symptomatic health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities or nursing homes. These tests would require quick responses, possibly same day results. Ball estimates 17,000 tests per week would be needed for all people in priority level one.
The second level of priority includes asymptomatic people and staff in correctional facilities. The third level of priority includes asymptomatic employees at essential businesses who work with the public in large volumes. An additional 26,000 tests per week would be needed for people in priority level two while an additional 86,000 tests per week would be needed for those in priority level three, Ball said.
If all priority groups were tested weekly, approximately 150,000 tests per week would be needed, Ball said. He said the main problem to reaching this goal is access to testing products, but technological improvements and new testing devices are being introduced weekly that will help the state reach the recommended capacity.
Shaw-Tulloch said contact tracing capacity will be scaled up by training staff under public health departments and the state department to create a “fleet.”
“The take-away message from these recommendations is that we will need to build incredible testing capacity plus the ability to respond to all of those results with appropriate clinical and public health follow-up care,” Ball said. “If we hope to provide this wide-scale, repeated testing for all Idahoans who may need testing, it will be a very collaborative effort.”
Ball recommended investment in local testing and expansion of molecular diagnostic testing, which identifies the presence of the virus to determine who is currently infected. Serological antibody testing determines human antibodies to determine who has been exposed to the virus previously. He said serological antibody testing will be useful at a later point in the response.
One reporter asked how Idaho plans to scale up testing when the state ranks so poorly in Kaiser Family Foundation’s ranking of state by amount of COVID-19 testing. As of May 22, Idaho ranked 46 out of 55 in total number of tests with results and 51 in number of tests with results per 1,000 population. As of the same date, Idaho ranked 50 out of 51 in tests per 100,000 population in a Johns Hopkins University and Medicine ranking.
“We were aware of that,” Little said. “Some of the states are counting lots of antibody, lots of serological tests. Our testing in Idaho, for the most part, is quite rigorous and there are multiple entities that are analyzing that metric you alluded to. Most of the metrics that (IDHW) Director (Dave) Jeppsen talked about were about in the middle.”
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]