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A medical lab on 96th Street says it can have COVID-19 results within two days and has already found patients testing positive for the virus in the area.
Aria Diagnostics, 635 W. 96th St., said Tuesday it has 3,000 tests available and can do up to 5,000 tests per day, but the business hasn’t seen anywhere near 5,000 people come through its drive-thru in the time its been available.
In the last several weeks, Aria says it developed a COVID-19 virus test that complies with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The test takes up to 48 hours to get results.
Aria staff say close to 50 people have come through for drive-thru testing in the two days it’s been offered. (Photo provided)
“The CDC didn’t allow for private commercial labs to do this until just last week,” Aria Diagnostics partner Zak Khan said. “As soon as they did it, we found it incumbent on us to play a role to provide these tests to the community.”
With the volume of tests Aria has available, the business expected to be swamped with people coming to get tested, but the staff administering the tests says they’ve maybe seen close to 50 people in the two days they’ve been testing.
“How do we get out, more people, the word out so that more people get tested so we can start mitigating the risk of the spread of the coronavirus any further than it already has gone?” Khan said.
Not just anybody can drive up to the lab and get tested. Everyone through there needs to be referred by a physician. To get the tests to more people, doctors need to know the testing is ready and available.
“Whether they decide to test a patient or not has been from a position of scarcity because there weren’t enough tests. The test kits themselves weren’t available,” Khan said. “Now, we have plenty of test kits, thousands of test kits and the capacity to do thousands of tests since the CDC allowed commercial labs to do it, so, I’d strongly urge physicians to re-evaluate the protocol. Because now, we can test. So instead of testing or deciding the protocol based from a position of scarcity to test based on a protocol of a desire to test everybody so we can mitigate the risk of this coronavirus growing and spreading.”
In the end, it’s up to the physician if the patient gets tested or not, but Aria says it’s also up to patients to be their own advocates.
“If a patient feels they might have been exposed, they might reach out to the physician, let them know, ‘Hey, I might have been exposed,’” Khan said. “The other ICD-10, which is the diagnosis code in order to order the test, is actual exposure where they say ‘Hey, I was somewhere and I know that I’ve been exposed to coronavirus.’ Those are the two ways a patient might reach out to their physician and ask to be tested.”
Aria says it’s still trying to let physicians know that it’s available for testing. Aria has forms on its website to give to physicians.
Aria Diagnostics is an independent medical lab certified by the state. The state health department says it makes biannual checks on certified labs to ensure they’re doing things reliably, accurately and timely.