A nationwide Covid-19 testing crunch has made its way to Western New York.
Kaleida Health is running short on some of the materials it needs to process tests, thereby forcing providers that rely on its lab to curtail testing.
Catholic Health has run into similar issues, forcing it to cut back its broad community testing and focus efforts on its patients and staff.
And medical centers that rely on Quest Diagnostics to process the tests are complaining about delays of up to two weeks in getting results – long enough to render the results useless.
The Erie County Department of Health and Erie County Medical Center have avoided such problems, but other health care providers say they are suffering from the lack of a national Covid-19 testing strategy.
"Without a coordinated federal effort around testing, you risk having everyone fending for themselves with ordering supplies, getting supplies," said Mark A. Sullivan, the president and CEO of Catholic Health. "So that's the challenge: that we're up against the 50 states."
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The ramifications of that fact came clear in Niagara Falls last week when officials abruptly canceled plans to open five new testing sites. The reason? Those tests were supposed to be processed at Kaleida's lab, but Kaleida's suppliers had diverted reagents used in the testing process to Covid-19 hot spots in the South and West.
"Basically, the supply that was left is barely enough to do our own patients and our own healthcare workers," said Joseph A. Ruffolo, president and CEO of Niagara Falls Medical Center.
Michael P. Hughes, chief of staff at Kaleida Health, confirmed that the giant health care provider is facing difficulties getting supplies.
"You have to remember that we are competing statewide, nationally and internationally every day when it comes to testing supplies," Hughes said. "So it’s a battle for our laboratory and purchasing teams. That said, they have done a phenomenal job."
And while Kaleida is confident it can test its patients and employees, "it will be tight, no doubt about it, when it comes to helping our community partners like nursing homes, clinics and other hospitals for pre-procedural testing," Hughes added.
Catholic Health, which also has a lab to process Covid-19 testing, has suffered similar shortages and has taken steps to counter them.
"We are not doing a lot of the community testing," Sullivan said. Catholic Health set up drive-through testing sites in May, "but recognizing the challenges, we stepped away from that," he added.
Meanwhile, Jericho Road Community Health Center is running into delays of up to two weeks in getting test results back from Quest Diagnostics, the national lab that processes its tests. Jericho Road's founder and CEO, Dr. Myron Glick, said test results that arrive that late render contact tracing – seen as necessary to controlling community spread of Covid-19 – impossible.
"We just don't have the capacity to do testing the way we should be doing testing to get this thing under control," Glick said. "I don't care what anyone says, it's just absolutely true. We don't have the capacity. And that's not something that's just Jericho Road. That's something that's consistent in New York State and it's consistent across the nation."
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that testing remains problematic in many places nationwide.
"The average test delay is too long," he said. "And that really undercuts the value of the testing, because you do the testing to find out who's carrying the virus and then quickly get them isolated so they don't spread it around."
There are a handful of bright spots, though. Erie County has not run short of testing supplies and neither has ECMC.
Erie County's lab gets regular supplies of reagents directly from the federal Centers for Disease Control and stocked up on other testing supplies early, Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz said.
"We wanted to ensure that we had on hand sufficient stock in case we ended up having a huge increase as well here, not only for the summer but as we move closer to the fall in which we expect there to be a second wave," he added.
Poloncarz said he was distressed to hear, though, that the Trump administration does not want funding for testing included in the next Covid-19 relief bill, which congressional leaders hope to finalize by early August.
President Trump has repeatedly downplayed the need for more testing, telling Fox News this weekend the nation already has "the best testing in the world."
Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, took issue with that claim. After hearing about the testing cutbacks in Niagara Falls, he wrote to Admiral Brett Giroir, the Trump administration's testing czar, to complain.
The problems locally "are indicative of the overall failure of the United States federal government, the Trump administration, to protect the health and safety of the American people," Higgins said in an interview.
