Health Officer: Swabs, Testing Supplies Still Short

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Sonoma County is focusing on more aggressive contact tracing in an effort to contain the coronavirus, this according Dr. Sundari Mase, Sonoma County’s Health Officer who gave an update on local conditions during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday.

Mase said the work will allow healthcare workers to more effectively contain the virus in Sonoma County by tracing who might have been exposed to newly diagnosed coronavirus patients in the days immediately preceeding positive virus test.

Across the state of California, healthcare officials are using contact tracing as one tool to help contain the virus, along with more aggressive testing to find cases of the coronavirus that are certainly going undetected.

All of this comes as Mase and other health officials say the supply of swabsticks and other testing materials continues to be a limiting factor in how many tests can be performed. On Tuesday the health officer said the Sonoma County lab is not processing at its capacity of 120 tests a day, but could if testing supplies were available.

Kaiser Permanente now is processing coronavirus tests in house, and Sutter Healthcare has recently begun this as well according to Mase. The major commercial lab that process tests, Quest, has had major delays and difficulty returning results as it struggles to process thousands of tests from across the state.

As of Tuesday, Sonoma County reported 120 cumulative coronavirus cases, of which 81 were active, 38 patients had recovered, with one death attributed to the coronavirus. Almost 2800 tests had been performed on county residents, indicating that approximately 96 percent of tests had come back negative.