Rural Mid-Missouri communities increase COVID-19 testing
COLUMBIA Mo. (KMIZ)
A COVID-19 testing laboratory in Columbia says it is seeing rural communities across Missouri increase COVID-19 testing.
"That landscape is shifting a lot," said Tim McCarty, the Marketing Director of GeneTrait Laboratories. "It could be access to testing materials, it could be the community is identifying these first couple of cases, and we're beginning to see a lot more more tests in the community because of that."
GeneTrait Labs works with health care providers across the state to test for COVID-19.
Health care providers will test patients and send the specimen off to GeneTrait Labs to be tested. Once at the lab, GeneTrait has the ability to test thousands of swabs per day. Results are then sent to the state.
McCarty says the lab has tested around 12,000 COVID-19 kits to date with a 5.5% positive rate. He says they've seen roughly 600 positive and 11,500 negative cases.
"We're testing between 300 and 500 a day, pretty consistently averaging about 400 a day," McCarty said. "Our testing volume per day has remained consistent for the last week or so."
The lab projects to have completed 15,000 COVID-19 tests by the end of April.
McCarty said the lab's partners are helping source essential materials but they will need more in order to hit the lab's capacity of 20,000 tests per day.
"We have been successful recently, and tapping a couple more supply chains, as far as testing kits supplies," McCarty said. "We're feeling more confident, moving forward, that we'll have those materials that the community needs but it's still an ongoing effort, for sure."
