As COVID cases drop, so does the demand for testing

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ.)

A drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations is being reflected in lower demand for tests, causing at least one local health care provider to pull back on testing.

Boone Health said Monday that it will no longer have a testing site at Nifong Plaza after the hospital noticed a drop in test demand and hospital officials say they're seeing fewer COVID-19 patients. As of Tuesday, anyone in need of a COVID-19 test will have to visit another lab location. However, Boone Health plans to extend its hours at its Broadway Medical Plaza lab.

"That really started to taper off pretty much around the beginning of last week," Dr. Robin Blount, Boone Hospital's chief medical adviser, said Monday. "So we'll see where we're at for that demand but so far there's not a lot of people requesting testing."

Some of the drop in demand might be from home testing. Boone County residents have reported 358 positive at-home tests to the county health department, according to the department's COVID-19 dashboard.

Boone County hospitals have administered nearly 47,000 positive COVID-19 tests since the pandemic started. Test demand statewide has plummeted over the past two weeks, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The seven-day average of tests statewide was about 28,000 on Jan. 25 but dropped to about 15,500 as of Monday.

Blount said that although demand for tests is down, it's crucial that Missourians continue to try to prevent the virus from spreading.

"The hope is, that the trend is right," Blount said. "You know we still don't know what will totally happen, so it still makes sense to mask and stay distant and stay out of large group gatherings where people are not masked. I mean all of these things are things that have been spreading the virus."

There's also a testing site located on 115 W Business Loop that hasn't had much COVID-19 traffic either.

"We've seen the same thing, just almost as quickly as the cases and testing went up, we've seen it come back down", Nanda Nunnelly owner of Next-Gen Diagnostics said.

But Nunnelly says although cases are dropping it's important not to get too comfortable because it could peak again. As of now, W Business Loop's testing site numbers have dropped significantly over the past couple of weeks.

"Numbers have dropped a lot. I just talked to my team today and I think that there probably will end up testing you know around 50 people today. The first week we know we were well over 250, and then the next week it was 75 so it has gone down", Nunnelly said.