BIMARCK, ND (trfnews.i234.me) North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum says a shortage of supplies at the State Lab delayed recent test results.
almost 3/4 of the positives in the last three days have come out of Cass County we want to make sure that we are there and trying to kind of stop the spread of those of the people associated with those that are coming up positive so we’ll keep driving on that and give you more of an update on Wednesday as far as testing shortage again you saw that our numbers were lower today in testing than they have been when we cleared the 2000 mark and we’re back down to 1300 and you know we’ve been aggressively trying to ramp up our testing capacity just in the state lab alone which did typically a even a big day in the pre pre Cova days 195 tests per day would have been a big number and that would have covered all kinds of things not just a single single disease category like kovat but now we’re running that lab 3 shifts 24 hours a day seven days a week and have built capacity to do over 2,000 tests a day and trying to grow that to 4,000 and then trying to grow it beyond that and so again we are building that capacity but that capacity also depends on availability of assortment of supplies that that that all need to come together through a supply chain and today we did run into a shortage of deep well plates on our thermal Fisher testing machine this unit has 19 different consumable pieces that must be on hand to run one test I know some people think all we need is a swab and a machine and away you go but this is a super complicated work and the team has been doing a great job on this and of course in this environment or in in normal times supply chain management can be challenging but now when we’re competing against all other 50 states you’ve got FEMA you’ve got other federal agencies that are in that are competing trying to move orders around in the hot spots of which were not but our team has done a great job of allowing us to grow as we said and move up to number four in the nation in tests per capita but we did have a glitch here related to these shortage deep well plates and for a while we thought that was going to be a major holdup the good news it turns out that research universities in particular the NDSU diagnostic lab had a hundred of these and each one of these deep well plates this is kind of vertical view but think of it as I will say test tubes but if you’re going back to high school chemistry they would go into these plates they can hold up to 96 apiece samples in here a hundred of these plates will get us 9600 capacity and this will help us get us back up to at least 1875 tests per day by tomorrow but again I want to thank the the lab team and everybody there that’s exploring every option from private to public to to make sure that we keep ourselves going
Supply Shortages Cause Delays in Test Results at North Dakota State Lab
