Current Events > Why cant people get results in 1 day?

(+) Yeah! (+)

That's one of the reasons this virus keeps spreading. The testing sucks. People get tested then don't even quarantine. You shouldn't go anywhere until you get results.

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i took a test in the parking lot at my work that took less than 15 minutes

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The Trent posted...

i took a test in the parking lot at my work that took less than 15 minutes

Yeah but did you get the results right then?

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yes i sat there with the dude and watched my blood creep up the strip
i got results before i could go into the building

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if this is not clear enough
test to results time was 15 minutes

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Thought this was about leg day

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The Trent posted...

yes i sat there with the dude and watched my blood creep up the strip
i got results before i could go into the building

All the tests should be like that.

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i've done 3 different tests now

1. test at the hospital - shallow nose - 2-3 hours to results
2. test at my work - blood finger prick - 15 minutes to result
3. test at medical center before procedure - deep brain fuck through nose - 2 days to results

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My work (which owns a lab in Tennessee) takes 48 hours for results.

I've heard some areas of the US can take up to 3 weeks for a result.
Yikes.
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The Trent posted...

i've done 3 different tests now

1. test at the hospital - shallow nose - 2-3 hours to results
2. test at my work - blood finger prick - 15 minutes to result
3. test at medical center before procedure - deep brain fuck through nose - 2 days to results

Now I'm going to have to look that up on bing, with safesearch off.

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R1masher posted...

Thought this was about leg day

Lol me too

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Guide posted...

Now I'm going to have to look that up on bing

it's a texas sized cotton swab they ram that up the nose into the brain to get a sample.
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Cause the real test takes time.

It's a multistep process
First, a sample is taken from a patient's nose or throat, using a special swab. That swab goes into a tube and is sent to a lab. Some large hospitals have on-site molecular test labs, but most samples are sent to outside laboratories for processing. More on that later.

That transit time usually runs about 24 hours, but it could be longer, depending on how far the hospital is from the processing laboratory.
Once at the lab, the specimen is processed, which means lab workers extract the virus's RNA, the molecule that helps regulate genes.
"That step of cleaning the RNA extraction step is one limiting factor," says Cathie Klapperich, vice chair of the department of biomedical engineering at Boston University. "Only the very biggest labs have automated ways of extracting RNA from a sample and doing it quickly."
After the RNA is extracted, technicians also must carefully mix special chemicals with each sample and run those combinations in a machine for analysis, a process called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect whether the sample is positive or negative for COVID.

"Typically, a PCR test takes six hours from start to finish to complete," says Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Some labs have larger staffs and more machines, so they can process more tests at a time than others. But even for those labs, as demand grows, so does the backlog.

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I mean we're doing the best we can...give us a break lol.

It depends on the test type. It's a qRT-PCR based technique. Those tend to take awhile..especially if RNA is manually extracted. COVID-19 testing isn't very profitable (which unfortunately drives what a given lab in our wonderful system decides to do). The most cost efficient way to do it is to test in bulk on a high-throughput automated system. So that means the samples are generally sent from multiple other locations and tested in batch with the others from that day (that's what our diagnostic lab does with our local testing of overflow from area hospitals).
Also keep in mind that the patient info has to be verified every step of the way, then the reports also verified in order to ensure no sample mixup. There are faster tests that we've been working on, which are in self-contained kits. Those are quicker, and are looking promising as far as their efficiency..but also expensive.

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