NORFOLK, Va. — There seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to testing for coronavirus. People emailed 13News Now asking about the test kits and how many are actually available.
According to Sentara Healthcare officials, they said they have access to tests through commercial labs and will use them if they can't get them from the State Health Department. Sentara laboratories expect to be able to conduct COVID-19 testing in-house at regional sites in the next few weeks. They are purchasing equipment and creating a process to make sure test results can be turned around quickly.
The FDA said the Center for Disease Control had manufacturing problems at first with the tests. Officials said the issues are resolved, but it created problems expanding access to public health labs and other developers.
On the FDA website, officials said the CDC shipped more than 1 million test kits to non-public health labs. They also shipped to public laboratories to test about 75,000 people who think they have COVID-19. Integrated DNA Technologies and other manufacturers who create the kits believe they can scale up production by the end of next week.
FDA officials say manufacturers think they can ship more than four million test kits. This does not include the ramp-up expected by large commercial or academic labs.