Calendar and clocks are ticking down towards Christmas Eve and this year’s big homecoming weekend.
Outbreak of infection and a sharp increase in positive covid-19 samples burst the capacity of the large hospital laboratories.
Questions from many in quarantine or isolation pending analysis results for PCR test:
– Are we coming home for Christmas?
The answer is yes for most people who have already taken the test and are in the system.
But the laboratories are careful to give a Christmas guarantee now that the analysis time increases with the workload.
Hunting for omicron infection in the positive samples doubles the analysis job.
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– There will be some difficult days both for those who wait and those who analyze, says Gunnar Skov Simonsen to Dagbladet.
He is head of the Department of Microbiology and Infection, which analyzes all the samples from Finnmark, Troms and Nordland at the laboratories at University Hospital of Northern Norway (UNN) in Tromsø.
Three days transport
– Now it takes up to 48 hours from a person with suspected infection being tested until the result is clear, including sequencing for delta or omicron.
– And then we have to take into account that a large part of the tests have been done here in Tromsø with minimal shipping time here to the hospital. Not long ago, this analysis time was down to less than 30 hours.
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– And with the large distances here, it can take one, two or three days before the test samples arrive here at the laboratory, depending on the scheduled traffic, Skov Simonsen explains.
To the laboratory at Ahus in Lørenskog, it is a short journey with most samples, which have passed one million in number since the pandemic started.
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From one to four days
Throughout the autumn, the response times have been good – less than 24 hours after the tests have been taken.
In recent weeks, the number of samples for analysis has doubled, including detection of omicron, respiratory diagnosis and RS virus. The response time increased at the end of the previous one to three days, the hospital informs in an email to Dagbladet on Friday.
– DESPAIRING: Department head Kariann Vangen Frøystein says it can be losing the night’s sleep from watching the response times on testing increase. Here together with service technician Martin Nielsen from Roche. Photo: Andrea Kovonen Sæten / Ahus.
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To Romerikes Blad On Wednesday, the head of the laboratory activities at Ahus, Kariann Vangen Frøystein, stated that the response time can be up to four days.
Vacuuming for staffing
– The staffing the biggest challenge. The market is vacuumed, says the laboratory manager.
The hospital states that 40 additional employees work with test results and analyzes now compared to before the pandemic start in March 2020. At that time, there were 160 employees.
The new quarantine rules
The laboratory now needs 20 more professionals. It takes three months of training for employees who are already trained and working in health sciences.
– Desperate
– It is despairing and almost to lose the night’s sleep from seeing the response times increase. It is not fun to experience that we are a kind of plug in the system, says Kariann Vangen Frøystein to Romerikes Blad.
Ahus has the same priority as other hospital laboratories:
The hospital’s inpatients, staff and samples from infections first. Samples from the test stations have the last priority.
