Maybe not totally unexpected but yesterday we had the message come through that the ‘new’ en-masse testing regime has become overwhelmed and has had to be temporarily stopped in our area.
After the big push at the end of last week we were given the green-light to more or less test anybody coming into the hospital regardless, the labs in our consortium have had so many samples that this has now been stopped and we have gone back to very strict guidelines on testing, so only for patients/staff who are showing symptoms and no re-testing of long term inpatients or patients before they are discharged back to a home.
No idea how long this will last for…
In a clinical setting what we really need is an instant test that gives us a result within minutes, currently we have started a limited elective service for urgent cases but these patients have to have a CV19 test 4-5 days before their date to come in and then are asked to self-isolate so are hopefully still negative when they return for surgery… not ideal as there is always a chance they could have picked up something.
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