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Friday, March 20, 2020

"The state [of Alaska] Public Health Laboratories had more than 1600 kits as of Tuesday."

Since I haven't seen this number anywhere, I thought I'd post it now.  It came in an email from Deputy Director, Alaska Division of Public Health Jill Lewis in response to my direct question about how many tests we had.  Last week she'd mention the number 500 tests.  So this time I asked:
"Do you have any updates on the number of tests Alaska has? (The state website has now reported that over 500 tests have been given.)"

So, once again:

"The state Public Health Laboratories had more than 1600 kits as of Tuesday [March 17,2020]."

She didn't mention commercial labs and whether they have additional tests.
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2 comments:

  1. CloudyinAKSaturday, March 21, 2020 at 10:57:00 AM AKDT

    So why, if we have more than 1600 kits, is our state health director asking for donations of swabs from the public? Swabs! Testing is held up because we're short swabs?!?

    ReplyDelete
  2. SteveSaturday, March 21, 2020 at 1:16:00 PM AKDT

    I didn't hear about the swab shortage until after I posted this. Can't answer you. But the lack of tests is huge and it seems everyone is trying to downplay it. But only testing people with symptoms (and not all of those) is just using tests to diagnose individual patients. We need surveillance testing too to find out who out there has the virus - particularly those with few or no symptoms. That appears how South Korea shut down the virus there - massive testing.

    ReplyDelete

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