CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A top official with LabCorp says so far in the battle against the pandemic Covid 19, West Virginia has managed to make all the right moves.
According to Dr. Brian Caveney, head of diagnostics for the Burlington, North Carolina-based company, West Virginia has become a model for the rest of the country.
Dr. Brian Caveney“Just of the tests we’ve run on West Virginians, only about two percent were positive, whereas the national average for us, and we’ve done almost a million tests across the country, the average is about 16 percent,” Caveney said during a Saturday appearance on MetroNews “Talkline” with Hoppy Kercheval.
Caveney, who is an Elm Grove, West Virginia native and holds his medical and law degrees from WVU, lauded the Covid 19 response team assembled by Governor Jim Justice.
“West Virginia is a model because they acted so quickly after the first case and the percentage of cases which are positive in West Virginia is dramatically lower than the national average,” he said.
West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources and the West Virginia National Guard have partnered with Lab Corps, which already has a number of outlets all across the state, to ramp up the testing procedures and increase the turnaround time for results.
“We’ve actually performed more than 20,000 tests since we launched back on March 5th. We’re backing up the hospitals, local labs, and the state public health lab in their testing capacity around the state where it’s needed the most,” Caveney said.
Brian Caveney, executive VP and President of Diagnostics at @LabCorp, talks to @HoppyKercheval about COVID-19 tests and treatment in WV. WATCH: https://t.co/wkudfIRZCB pic.twitter.com/R83mWwJSuR
— MetroNews (@WVMetroNews) April 25, 2020
Increased testing is the most critical issue in getting the state back to work and the economy moving again. Caveney said in addition to their testing work, Lab Corps is also a research company working to help find a cure or a vaccine for Covid 19 down the road. Caveney predicted that would be complicated and may be at least two years away if a vaccine can ever be found.
As for the increased testing, which will be a key to getting West Virginians back on the job, Caveney says they are there.
“Testing has gone through several different phases of supply and demand and right now there is so much more capacity. Right now, just our company, we can actually do about 30 times more tests per day than we did the first day of March when we launched.” he said.
According to Caveney they can do 55,000 to 65,000 tests daily across the country and other labs now have similar capacity. He added the turnaround time has expanded too. It now takes about two days to know the results. Early on during the pandemic, the tests results were taking nearly two weeks–which is the recommended quarantine time for those who do test positive. Caveney predicted that will get faster as well.
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April 25, 2020 at 11:16PM
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