vastbel.blogg.se

However, it is unclear how much longer the state will be using its state-supported testing sites. “It’s incredibly important to monitor the impact of cases in our state, among other things.” “Please make sure that that reporting is happening timely to the Department of Health,’' McKinstry said. The regulations will apply to private testing labs, healthcare facilities that use point-of-care devices as well as hospital labs, and are likely to include new penalties for failure to report results in a timely fashion, she said in Tuesday phone call with hospital officials. Molly McKinstry, a deputy secretary at the Agency for Health Care Administration, said Tuesday that the federal government is now drafting regulations that increase the penalties for failing to report test results in a timely fashion. He said the state uses several labs at more than 60 state-supported testing sites, “and we have no concerns with transitioning the few sites that utilized Quest to labs that will be able to step in and provide COVID-19 testing while meeting expectations and following Florida law.”

On Tuesday, Mahon said that Quest Diagnostics “was only being utilized at a limited number of state-supported sites” and would be replaced with other lab providers. “The switch was made on July 20 to provide faster results for those being tested at our site, which is always a priority of the state,’' Florida Division of Emergency Management spokesperson Jason Mahon told the Bradenton Herald in late July.

In May, a spike of about 550 cases of COVID-19 in Miami-Dade County was blamed on a backlog of three-week-old test results from an undisclosed testing site.Īnd in Bradenton, after delays with test results at a state-run lab at a Home Depot, the state stopped using Quest and began using Mako Medical labs instead. Three weeks ago, the Department of Health announced that Niznek Labs of Miami Gardens reported more than 4,000 case results that dated as far back as June 23, skewing the data in the Aug. This isn’t the first time DeSantis has complained about an unexpected spike in test results because of a data dump from the testing companies. “The problem is when you’re sloppy with it, it ends up impacting people’s lives and, again, it shouldn’t be that way.”

“We do want data but some of this data is just flawed,’' he said. “This is not the way a lot of this information was designed to be used,’' DeSantis said. DeSantis lamented how local officials were relying on the information to make decisions. He said that Quest, which has conducted 1.4 million of the 6.4 million COVID-19 tests in Florida, has had some of the worst backlogs. “This Is the most egregious dump we have had,’' DeSantis said Tuesday at a media event in Jacksonville. Miami-Dade County has been the epicenter of Florida’s coronavirus crisis, and elected officials have relied on data compiled by the state and reported by private labs, many of them with state and federal contracts, to produce a real-time picture of how widespread the infection is in their communities.įor months, news organizations have asked the Department of Health to be transparent about its testing backlog, as absent data could obscure the pandemic’s size and hamper efforts to decide when it’s safe to loosen restrictions.Īlthough the state pays the private labs for the services, and private labs complete more than 90 percent of Florida’s tests, the governor and state health officials never required private labs to report the backlog.