Fresno County should be doing six to 10 times more COVID-19 testing, new guidelines suggest
Fresno County should be testing about 1,500 people a day for COVID-19, which is anywhere from six to 10 times more than the number of tests currently being conducted, said Dr. Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer.
About 150 to 250 Fresno County residents currently are tested for coronavirus each day, Vohra said Monday. Experts recommend 152 people per 100,000 get tested, Vohra said. There are just under 1 million people living in Fresno County.
So far, 5,149 people in total have been tested, according to the county’s coronavirus data dashboard.
Vohra said the recent news from experts on testing was “eye opening,” but he stopped short of saying the county is failing since the effort to ramp up testing is ongoing.
“It would be a failure if we stopped trying right now. And we’re definitely not going to do that,” he said. “We’ve really started to do this as a marathon, and we just passed mile one, and we have a long way to go.”
He said he’s optimistic the county will increase its testing capacity in the coming days and weeks.
County officials have requested additional swab kits and reagents to process test samples. They’ve reached out to every vendor they could to access more testing, Vohra said.
The county has labs, personal protective equipment and trained staff ready to fight the virus and test people, he said.
“The only things that’s limiting us right now is that we don’t have enough of those Q-Tips, those swabs, which seems like a really silly shortage, but it is really legitimate as a reason why we’re not able to test more people,” Vohra said. “I think that this is just a national and an international shortage that we’re kind of trapped in.”
Fresno also has struggled with the turnaround rate for test results. In March, some residents reported waiting about two weeks for results. Since then, the county partnered with Fresno State to process test samples in an effort to reduce the wait time for results.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Public Health created a public-private coronavirus test task force to boost the state’s testing capacity. Vohra said he’ll continue advocating for the central San Joaquin Valley’s needs to that task force.
Vohra’s goal is to test entire communities and people who are asymptomatic — what he calls “surveillance testing” — to identify and prevent outbreaks. Those kinds of strategies are outlined in Newsom’s checklist for the road to recovery.
Fresno County had 351 cases and seven deaths as of Monday, its most recent update. Over 100 have recovered. About 4,700 people have tested negative.
This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 6:11 PM.