As COVID-19 test sites operate near capacity, Fresno County looks to primary care doctors

There was a sweet spot, back in May and into early June, when coronavirus testing in Fresno County was happening on an almost same-day basis. You could feel symptoms, and get tested quickly at one of the county’s three main sites.

Currently, the sites — at Fresno City College, the Sanger Community Center and West Fresno Regional Center — are operating at 90 percent capacity most days and are not meeting the demands of everyone who wants to get tested, Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, said during a media briefing Wednesday.

“In the last six weeks, the sites have been operating at such capacity that it is hard for people to get next-day testing,” Vohra said. Currently, it can take up to a week to get an appointment for a test.

“That in itself,” he said, “speaks for the demand that is out there.”

The county is alleviating some of that demand with pop-up testing events, like one that took place in Huron on Wednesday. More than that, the county health department is looking to ramp up testing by mandating that primary care clinics and doctor’s offices offer testing, and also to use resources from the state’s testing task force to find available labs to process those tests.

That process will happen over the next few weeks.

“We want you to have a physician,” Vohra said.

Primary care doctors will be able to give patients a more tailored and sophisticated set of instructions and immediately begin the process of contact tracing.

“It’s not just about the swab; it’s about the contract tracing. It’s about ‘what if you come down with a complication from COVID?’ It’s a more sustainable way to take care of people,” Vohra said.

A full list of current testing sites and events can be found online.

Pushing through the state backlog of tests

Increasing testing capacity does come with the risk of creating a backlog of results, especially as the county continues to work through the backlog created last week by a glitch in the state’s reporting system. Staff has been moved to help with the cases, which have been added to the state’s system but have not yet been processed by the county.

As of Wednesday, there were 1,800 tests that are believed to be positive waiting to be processed and added to the county’s reporting dashboard, according to Dr. Stephanie Koch-Kumar, a senior epidemiologist with the Fresno County Department of Public Health.

The glitch did not affect reports of deaths or hospitalizations.

Currently, positive cases are reported as they are processed, which can show a delay from the actual onset date of each case. Eventually, the county hopes to be able to report cases based on onset dates.

Of course, reporting a positive test to the county health department, and eventually out to the public, is less important than reporting it to the patients, who need to isolate themselves immediately.

“It is most important for them to know,” Koch-Kumar said.

“That’s how we’re going to beat this disease.”

Fresno County case numbers

Fresno County has reported 18,344 positive cases of the coronovirus, according to state numbers through Tuesday. One-hundred ninety-one people have died from the illness.

The county currently has 273 people in the hospital due to the virus. This is a slight decrease from past weeks, but not the downward trend that is being seen across the rest of California.

ICU admissions are flat, Koch-Kumar said.

This story was originally published August 12, 2020 at 1:39 PM.