424 Individuals Tested During Thursday’s COVID-19 Shutdown at Grand Forks Plant

GRAND FORKS, ND (trfnews.i234.me) Coronavirus testing is underway at LM Wind Power in Grand Forks. The plant was shutdown this week, after several employees tested positive for the virus. On Thursday, 424 people were tested.
Neil Berg here in the industrial park in Grand Forks at LM wind powered their a turbine manufacturing plant for those wind generators you see all over the country as I News first told you on Tuesday several employees tested positive for coronavirus today the National Guard has stepped in to help test as many as 300 people a few days ago there was some positive cases of kovat identified in Grand Forks and working through the local public health from the State Health Department it was determined that this was a spot that we wanted to come up and do some additional testing to see if there was additional cases that were either asymptomatic or had mild symptoms so coordination through the State Health Department and our local providers here with Grand Forks Public Health they looked at this is a good opportunity and as with the National Guard we come up and support both of those entities to provide some extra bodies to help the traffic flow because we’re expecting a large number that’s my next question I guess about how many people are you expecting to test you know right now we’re looking at between two and three hundred and it could go more than that we we have testing material to do about 400 individuals today and hopefully that that covers all the people that have been identified as being symptomatic or directly linked to one of the positive cases and at this point though not all 900 employees of LM wind power are being tested nope we’re not we’re looking at the employees that are symptomatic and anybody that would there may be some cohabitation where an employee lives with somebody that was identified as positive those individuals are going to be tested and then we’re doing some random testing just to get a good cohort because with this illness there is asymptomatic individuals out there and we’d like to identify some of those as well last thing here and basically how does this process work they check-in and so you know where you’re testing and then get BIOS waffle so as they’re coming through the State Health Department developed an online survey that has them go in and fill out some information about any symptoms that they have and that there’s a database with that that we’re doing some cross-referencing with and yesterday a message was sent out through the Health Department that informed the people working directly with LM and to identify employees so they were contacted through text messages and phone calls yesterday informed of this event so as they come in then we go through a process of collecting some demographics information on them so that can follow their lab tests to them and then if there’s a positive or negative they get contacted by the health department to get their results to them what if the test is a nasal swab or mouth so so today we’re doing a combination of both we have some some nasal pharyngeal swabs that we’re doing and then we also have an oral pharyngeal that we’re doing as well that when would you expect test results on so part of that depends on the the throughput of the laboratory and the number of tests that they get in from around the state so traditionally we’ve been seeing tests back within 48 hours but with the the number we’re expecting today an unknown [Music] that could be delayed in some Neil Berg reporting for i-news TV