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10,000 people asked to redo COVID-19 test after Arizona lab back up

Embry Women's Health sent a notice to patients Thursday saying if they had an outstanding test prior to Dec. 13, they should get tested again.

MESA, Arizona — Ten thousand Arizonans received notice Thursday that their COVID-19 test results could be late and that they should get retested.

Embry Women's Health confirms they sent the notice after learning a lab they used to process their tests experienced "extreme unanticipated delays."

That's not the only frustration. With higher demand for testing, others going to sites across Arizona report longer wait times in line and fewer available time slots to go and get tested.

"When we got there there were 50 cars in front of us and I thought this can’t be good," said Joe Jacobs of Gilbert.

He took his 15-year-old son for a COVID test at Embry's Mesa Community College site on Dec. 7, after he was exposed to the virus at school the first week of December. 

They waited nearly two hours with an appointment until his son finally got a saliva test.

"They told us we’d get results in 24-48 hours since it was a saliva test," Jacobs said.

Forty-eight hours came and went. His son’s life was on hold with no sign of results until Jacobs got a message from Embry five days later, saying results weren’t coming.  

The notice says his son's sample apparently leaked and he'd need to be retested.

"He was very, almost depressed about it," Jacobs said. "Not getting results. He just sat down on his bed and put his hands on his head and shook his head. Said what do we do?"

Mesa Community College is one of the most popular testing sites for Embry Women’s Health and the demand is only going up. 

Raymond Embry, CEO of Embry Health TestNOW, says they’re constantly changing plans with labs to meet a growing demand.

Back in September, he says their sites statewide could run as few as 1,000 tests a day. Now in mid-December, they’re at 18,000 a day and trying to do more.

"We are not over testing the public," Embry says. "We are testing the exact number of patients that our labs have agreed to provide capacity with."

He explains that their operations are contingent on a lab's operation. So if one of their partner labs can accept more tests and provide results in a timely fashion, they can run more tests.  

Embry's website says they have more than 40 sites statewide.  

On Thursday, Embry explained some of their changes in scheduling and availability comes from a lab's ability to process results. For example, he explains that LabCorp can locally run 6,000 of their tests per day, but require all samples to be at the lab by midnight. Embry says they've adjusted some time frames to ensure that everything is done on time.

By next week, Embry hopes to be expanding their testing capabilities with 4 lab partners: LabCorp, Sonora Quest, AIT Labs in Texas, and Northwest Pathology in Washington.  

Embry wouldn’t name the lab with the backup mentioned in Thursday's notice, but says it was an isolated incident.

As for Jacobs' son, Embry says they saw leaks when they first started using saliva tests that were being shipped and processed to AIT Labs in Texas.  He says they've since swapped out the containers to prevent that from happening.

"The simple reality is when we’re testing 18,000 patients daily, the end result is that there will be a few errors."

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