Coronavirus Testing Underway At San Juan Capistrano Laboratory

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, CA —San Juan Capistrano Diagnostics Infectious Disease laboratory, a division of Quest, is up and running, conducting coronavirus testing for healthcare agencies across the southland and beyond.

Those tests, which were developed locally with specimens of COVID-19 that came from South Korea, were recently fast-tracked into approval by the Food and Drug Association.

According to Rachel Carr, a specialist with Quest Diagnostics, "providers anywhere in the U.S. are now able to order the new test service."

Quest is scaling capacity with the aim to validate and perform testing at other Quest Diagnostics high-complexity laboratories serving the United States.

"We expect to be able to perform tens of thousands of tests a week within the next six weeks," Carr told Patch.

Ideally, the testing occurs this way, as shown by the Orange County Healthcare Agency in a recent youtube video. A person being tested for coronavirus could know their results within "a matter of hours," according to an OCR report. Then, those results must be considered "presumptive" until confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control.

This is a "Qualitative Real-Time" test that detects nucleic acid in respiratory specimens of patients meeting the clinical criteria of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for COVID-19 testing, Carr told us.

Ideally, according to OC Healthcare, testing for COVID-19 looks like this:

As of this week, only 1,138 people have been tested for the virus across California, out of 7,675 tests available.

All the ingredients are not available at all of the labs, the Los Angeles Times reported. According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a speech on Thursday, the tests sent out last week were missing a key ingredient, known as a reagent.

Officials turned to private laboratories, such as Quest, to aid in completing the lagging tests.

The state of coronavirus testing across California has raised the concern of residents, already on edge about the disease. Meanwhile, Orange County Healthcare Agency Dr. Nichole Quick has remained consistent, saying that the risk of being infected by the virus known as COVID-19 remains low.

The diagnostic company, a leader in infectious disease testing services, is already testing numerous cases, a spokesperson for the company has said.

Steve Rusckowski, Chairman, CEO, and President of Quest Diagnostics spoke on the rapid FDA approval.

"We applaud the FDA for providing the flexibility for innovative, quality lab-developed tests to be brought to patients and providers quickly to advance effective response to the coronavirus outbreak."

Patients still need to discuss with their physicians whether or not they should be tested, as Quest will not collect specimens.

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