Arlington Lab Collects 1,484 Coronavirus Samples In First 30 Days

ARLINGTON, VA — When Arlington County's drive-thru coronavirus sample collection facility opened on March 18, staff members collected 60 samples that first day. A month later the facility, which came together as a joint effort of the Arlington County Health Department and Virginia Hospital Center, is collecting nearly double that number daily.

"A lot of it has been adapting to availability of testing kits, because so much about this pandemic, this public health crisis has been unfolding day over day, hour by hour, especially in the first couple of weeks," said James Meenan, director of VHC's Outpatient Lab.

Meenan credited the registration team, who takes the information from the patients and schedules the appointments, for helping to streamline the process and make it easier for patients and staff members.

"A couple of days we had 120-140, and we did not stay open a minute later," he said. "The beautiful thing about scheduling this is you can control so much in terms of the flow when they come. And so we can schedule everything in 5-minute, 10-minute increments. I would say that we're very comfortable doing 150 a day easily."

As of Monday morning, staff at the coronavirus sample collection site, located at 1429 N. Quincy St., have conducted 1,484 sample collections since the facility opened. That number includes 142 samples the site collected from Arlington nursing homes and assisted living centers.

One of Meenan's other roles at VHC is as the hospital's director of case management. In that position, he's been working with all of the county's nursing homes, assisted living centers, and homeless shelters for the last 15 years.

Early on in the planning process, those groups were identified as being at greater risk for contracting the virus. Rather than bringing senior patients to the collection site and risk infection, the VHC staff deliver the specimen kits to the nursing homes and assisted living centers.

"These are patients that the nursing leadership in these buildings has identified as either being at risk, being symptomatic, or being exposed," Meenan said. "The process is very similar. They give us a list of their patients. We register them. We label all the specimen kits, and then we deliver them so that their nursing staff can collect the specimens. Then we run them to the lab."

Currently, VHC is conducting Avid testing at the hospital and sending the remainder of samples to other labs for reference testing. With Avid testing, results are available within a few hours. Reference lab testing can take 24-48 hours to get results.

One of the ongoing concerns the sample collection site faces is ensuring it has enough tests available to continue processing patients at its current pace.

"That's something that we talk about twice a day," Meenan said. "We have conference calls twice a day to talk about inventories and supplies."

While Meenan confirmed the county has enough tests for the time being, he couldn't predict what the situation would be for long-term.

"The directive I'm getting is get as many patients tested as possible," he said. "We want this to be known to as many people that, 'Hey, if you need a test, we're here to test you.' The way we're operating is that we believe the more people we can get tested, the better off the community is going to be."

Originally, the coronavirus sample collection site was only open to Arlington County residents. But it has been expanded to include anyone in the D.C.-metro area who thinks they may have the new coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 illness.

Patients must first contact their own physician or health-care provider, who will evaluate them to see if testing is necessary. Once a patient has receive a physician's order, that can then call the VHC COVID-19 Scheduling Line at 703-558-5766 Only patients with a physician's order for testing and an appointment can visit the site, at 1429 N. Quincy St. Hours are weekdays, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

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