The current wait time for COVID-19 test results through the Contra Costa County Health Department is 10-12 days, according to workers at one of the county’s testing sites.
Call 844-421-0804 if you’d like to schedule an appointment to get tested. The next appointment to be tested at a drive-thru location in Concord is on July 21.
10-12 days could mean someone takes a test, dies and the family finds out after the funeral… Can’t we do better?
and hundreds of people they could infect before they know if they were positive. 14 day quarantine after you take the test is no good….
i agree. we should do better. This is a critical element in contact tracing and limiting the spread.
Everyone knows they prioritize health workers and oldies. If you are not sick or your test is negative you are not priority. I blame all the healthy people getting tests, backing up the system because they are paranoid from all the panic propaganda. If you’re not sick you don’t need a test
@Sam – How do you know negative tests are not a priority? If the test comes back negative, doesn’t that mean the lab already ran the test? The whole point behind mass testing is to find people who are asymptomatic and let them know they have the disease so they can self quarantine. The system is broken, the results should come back faster but less testing is not the answer. It will not make the disease go away.
@dan I know because I have friends. I know because health workers and people who are having surgery get their results in a couple days. I know because people who have symptoms get their results in a couple days. I know because people who are negative don’t find out for 10-12 days. Most importantly I know because that is what people are told when getting tests. There is no point behind mass testing other than to cause mass panic. You apparently don’t have any trust in the doctors and scientists to prioritize sick people and health workers over healthy people who just want a test. We have done more testing then any other country. We have more cases then any country. Something is broken for sure. Is it the tests themselves?
@Sam – I have a friend who began exhibiting symptoms over a week ago and still hasn’t received his test results. I still don’t understand how the lab knows to prioritize those test results that will come back positive. If they knew which results would come back positive, then why run the test in the first place?
We may have more cases than any other country because we are doing a horrible job managing the disease. We do not have a nationwide policy. Mask wearing has become a politically charged issue despite businesses, health officials and the international community supporting their use as an effective measure to slow the spread.
What a joke…
I know a person who called John Muir yesterday at 300 pm through their doctor and got an appointment at 5 pm the same day over on Treat Blvd. down by the health club. They were told in 5 days their doctor would have the results.
I had the Covid-19 test which was required before I had surgery. Appointment was made and test results back in 3 days. This was done at John Muir’s drive thru on Treat Blvd. The testing was performed using the Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay. Based on the article, I can only assume that CCCHD is very inefficient in this area.
Same here, but it took only two days.
The Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay is best for use in doctors offices but does not scale well to expanded testing as it ideally tests 72-96 samples per day. The county is using PCR testing and it takes longer to process than the Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay.
If you test at a county site (Concord – Bates Ave) where my family tested it takes about 10 days. If you test at the contract sites in Walnut Creek and Brentwood the testing time seems to be much shorter – and some have received there test the next day.
Regardless, ten days is way too long to wait for results. I have a job that allows me to work from home, but my mother in law ran into issues with her boss since they expected her to have results in three days. She was eventually released from the job since she could not provide her results after a week of waiting for them.
This is ridiculous. That much delay makes the test basically useless. I read that part of the reason is that the big lab companies, Quest and LabCorp, are overtaxed, but lots of insurance still considers those two “in network” and other labs out of network. I think the capacity to fix this is out there but stupid bureaucracy is causing a bottleneck in sending too many people to the two big labs.
For example: Kaiser does some testing in house and some gets farmed out to a big lab company. And they prioritize based on urgency. My daughter and I got tested together at a Kaiser site: her result returned in less than 24 hours while mine took six days. There’s the difference between the samples getting sent to the big lab orgs and those done in-house or at a smaller company or academic lab. We need an executive order or bill making any approved lab “in network” for insurance purposes. And we need it yesterday.
A lot of this situation is genuinely intractable. But we could get red tape out of the way! The FDA could approve paper-strip self-administered Covid tests (yes, they exist) and we could move towards a situation where everybody could test everyday. That would crush the spread even if almost everything opened back up, and even if the tests aren’t super accurate. If you get a false negative one day chances are you would get a true positive the next day.
It is an outrage that the federal agencies supposed to be acting to protect the public have not botched the testing thing from start to finish. We need rapid tests at population scale. And we could have it if the FDA got its act together. (Or if Trump told it to fast-track such tests, and used the defense authorization to start manufacturing them at scale. They’re doing it with vaccine development and production. Why can’t we do it with testing? (And antibody treatments, for that matter.)
sorry, I meant an outrage that they *have* botched it…
What happened to that lab that was pushed through in Berkeley by Kaiser??
The lab was opened on June 3rd.
https://lookinside.kaiserpermanente.org/a-sense-of-pride-as-covid-19-lab-opens/
I still am not sure why Kaiser created the lab given its stated goal was and still is 10,000 tests per day. I’m assuming this lab is supporting Kaiser facilities throughout northern California. It’s a building that contains SARS-CoV-2 test processors manufactured by Roche. You can read about the machines at https://diagnostics.roche.com/us/en/products/systems/cobas-8800-system.html Kaiser is using the model 8800.
How is it UCSF can do the test and give you the results in 12 hours?
Thanks @ WCResident.
The Chinese Virus is not going away until there’s a cure or a vaccine. What a mess.
The entire testing/reporting industry has ben compromised. Some Florida labs were only reporting ‘positive’ results, bumping up the supposed infection rate. Same thing appears to have happened in other states. In other cases, antibody tests were comingled with tests for the virus. Can we be certain that ‘new’ coronavirus cases are actually new, and not just retests of people who were already infected? This isn’t science anymore, it is Voodoo, and actually, that isn’t fair to Voodoo.
The Virus Industrial Complex is absolutely corrupt. Virus Lies Matter!
Medical tests have always been prioritized. If someone’s situation is critical and knowing a test result is essential to deciding what treatment to use then the test will be processed immediately. If someone is an ICU their COVID-19 test will be processed at a slightly lower priority and most likely is available the same day or overnight.
If you sign up for a vanity test from the county then it’s last on the priority queue and takes 10-12 days. The odds of you testing as positive in CC county are about one in 600 or 0.17%. If you have an accidental close encounter with someone the same odds apply. Don’t freak out if your child runs up to someone and gives them a hug.
The 8% positivity rate that resulted in the imposition of additional lockdowns is a false statistic that never should be used for making decisions. What I see happening is that the test labs are overwhelmed. As a result, they are only processing those tests of people most likely to have COVID-19 and where knowing the test result is critical to medical care. For example, on July 8th it appears one of the labs was either off line or one of their test processing machines was off line. As a result the number of tests dropped from close to 2,000 to 700. As they then only ran the high priority tests the positivity rate jumped from 5% to 15%. That 15% was treated as a valid number for decision making.
That’s why I have been saying all along is that there needs to be at least two categories of tests. One is tests of symptomatic people and the other is tests of asymptomatic people. Report on the number of tests and the results for both categories. The number of symptomatic people showing up each day, the number of COVID-19 positive symptomatic people each day, and the positivity rate for asymptomatic test results all get fed into decision making.
What they are doing now is merging the apples and oranges of symptomatic/asymptomatic counts and test results and making decisions on that. It results in numbers that are more influenced by test processing availability than the true infection rate in the community.
It’s a beautifully executed plan. They have answers for everything and nothing at the same time.
Thanks, WC Resident…I’ve been enlightened! Appreciate the time you take to explain.