Local Officials To Take Over Dallas County Coronavirus Testing Sites With Goal Of Speeding Up Results
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Dallas County will end its coronavirus testing agreement with the federal government on Wednesday.
That's when local officials will take over.
Dallas County Judge Clay said the COVID-19 tests coming out of the Ellis Davis Field House and walkups are taking 8 to 10 days to return results.
He said that's not useful.
The county will opt for its own testing which will return results within 1 to 3 days.
Across the country, there's a lot of attention on rapid testing.
It can provide results anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.
While these tests are offered in Dallas County, they're not widely available.
The design and architect firm HOK, which has an office in Dallas, is partnering with Germfree Laboratories to try and change that.
Together they've developed a mobile rapid testing lab.
"We wanted to design something that was portable, that could be manufactured offsite and then delivered," HOK's Tim O'Connell said. "There's two modules to it. The first is for sample collection and then the second module is the testing lab itself."
"These are facilities that could be brought out to any sort of institution, commercial campus, corporate campus," HOK's Ben Crawford said.
Each testing lab would have two high-throughput diagnostic machines that can test 80 samples at a time, resulting in 1,100 tests a day.
"I think that the demand for testing continues to increase, especially based on what a what the news is saying in Texas, where there's just huge back ups to do the simple collection part even," O'Connell said. "I think it's going to help with the quantity of testing that we need to do."
HOK's first shipment of portable rapid testing labs will go out in mid-autumn.
Judge Jenkins says as far as testing at the Ellis Davis Field House goes, Parkland will start administering up to 500 tests a day starting Wednesday.
The goal is to move up to 1,000 tests a day after that.
