In-House Coronavirus Tests Offered At Evanston Hospital

EVANSTON, IL — NorthShore University HealthSystem became the first hospital group listed by the Illinois Department of Public Health as offering its own test for the new coronavirus. The five-hospital system began offering an in-house test for COVID-19 Thursday. Testing has initially only been offered to people who show more severe signs of infection.

Dr. Karen Kaul, chair of the hospital's pathology and laboratory medicine department, said NorthShore pursued its own testing capability to be able to relieve the stress on state labs.

"Right now we are looking at ways to increase the capacity of our testing here at NorthShore so that we can test more patients because I expect demand will be going up," Kaul said at a press conference Friday.

As of Monday, NorthShore had performed about 400 tests, with approximately 10 percent testing positive for the novel coronavirus, according to a NorthShore spokesperson.

"Because our testing capacity is not what we ultimately will need it to be, we are restricting access to the tests to patients who are symptomatic and ill," Kaul said. "This has been an effort to make the best use of reagents and materials we have available and also protect our patients and allow our healthcare workers to know the status of people they're dealing with in the hospital so they can be protected themselves."

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NorthShore Director of Microbiology and Infectious Disease Research Kamal Singh said the in-house test is used on patients who are hospitalized with suspected respiratory virus infections and who test negative for influenza, rhinovirus and other non-COVID-19 ailments.

"As everybody knows the amount of testing we have available is probably not at the level we would hope it would be so we do have to be very careful about who is currently being tested," Singh said. "What we have started is to try and stay very close to the recommendation by the Illinois Department of Public Health: that is essentially to test persons under investigation for COVID-19 infection."

That includes people who have fever, symptoms of a lower respiratory tract illness and a history of travel to an affected area, as well as those hospitalized with severe acute lower respiratory tract illness even in the absence of known source of exposure, Singh told reporters.

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NorthShore joined a couple dozen other hospitals around the country that have developed their own validated tests to supplement the limited number of tests distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent weeks. Commercial testing is likely to come online in coming days and weeks, Kaul said.

The health system is ramping up its capabilities and hopes to soon conduct more than 500 a day, Kaul told Crain's Chicago Business. Results are available within hours, days faster than other testing methods, and Kaul said NorthShore has been sharing material with other labs around the country to help them validate their own testing.

As of Monday evening, the IDPH website listed five commercial COVID-19 testing labs: Quest, LabCorp, Mayor, ARUP and NorthShore.