KNOX COUNTY, Tenn. — Knox County patients could wait nearly two weeks for coronavirus test results as the Health Department competes with its Nashville equivalent over laboratory testing capacity, the department director said Wednesday.
She added the delays were setting back virus containment efforts.
Nashville reportedly severed ties last week with Knox County Health Department's main testing provider, AEL Laboratories, after the laboratory took weeks to report positive results.
At Wednesday's media briefing, the department said it was experiencing delays of around 10 days from test date to results received. At times, its contact tracers waited 12 days to find out a result.
"We at public health are way behind the eight ball if reporting time is that far out," KCHD Director Dr. Martha Buchanan told the county's board of health Wednesday night.
"Now there are times when we get a report of a positive and that positive is outside their isolation time frame and we’ve done no contact investigation, we’ve not quarantined any of their contacts," Buchanan said.
Due to delays, a department spokesperson said, "We believe the lower numbers we have seen over the past several days are not an indication of fewer, new cases, but rather the result of lab delays."
Complicating efforts to find other labs with more capacity, the health department finds itself facing competition from its counterparts across the state.
"We actually, we had another lab that we were using and they told us they couldn’t keep providing service for us because they were going to provide services for Nashville," Buchanan said.
A spokesperson later clarified the laboratory name and the sequence of events: "We heard that Pathgroup would be conducting labs from Nashville; shortly after that we learned that could no longer conduct our labs. We surmised that the two were related."
With the continued lag in test result reporting, the health department raised a red flag for its testing benchmark Wednesday.
Its website said the average return rate fell over the past week from 5.17 to 2.42 days, but a spokesperson confirms that average could be skewed by the inclusion of tests from other providers--including those with in-house labs and 15-minute rapid tests.
Those 15-minute speedy result options can have a lower accuracy rate. The state health department warns they can have a high number of false negatives.
In a statement, a department spokesperson points out result delays are not unique to Knox County. Across the state and nation, the spokesperson said, laboratories face backlogs.
In a statement sent to 10News Friday, AEL said it has struggled to get supplies during the pandemic and has been working to expand testing capacity.