MIDLAND, Texas — Over 100 people have taken COVID-19 tests in Midland but haven't gotten any results as of March 24.
One test came back positive to Midland Memorial Hospital on Tuesday morning-it had been 10 days since that test was taken.
The real question is why is it taking so long to get an answer? Dr. Larry Wilson, Chief Medical Officer at Midland Memorial Hospital, has an answer.
"The only thing that we’ve been made aware of through our pathology department is that these sites are being overwhelmed with tests and that it's just a delay in being able to get them processed and through for us," Wilson said.
Another issue has been the vendors. They haven't been able to get results out as fast as people would like, so Midland Memorial has switched to different vendors.
"So we switched over last week to one of the vendors, and that vendor has yet to get us a single result back. So yesterday we started sending to another vendor that we’ve heard from local physicians that get tests back in about 24 hours," Wilson said.
While they may get faster results from these vendors, Wilson worries that they may also become so overwhelmed with tests that they are no longer able to quickly give out test results.
Wilson eventually wants to move to local testing, but that won't happen for at least a week.
"We're still looking at about a week or so from doing local tests. We're anticipating that once we’re able to do local tests that we’ll only test people coming into the hospital because there’s still going to be a limited supply of testing availability and ability to do those tests," Wilson said.
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