Though Sansum Clinic’s experimental “car based” COVID-19 testing program at its Urgent Care Center on Pesetas Lane off Highway 154 can’t compare with South Korea’s huge drive-through testing programs, it’s a small start in the right direction. Sansum CEO Dr. Kurt Ransohoff said the new pilot program — by appointment only — will help determine whether it should be expanded to other locations given the realities of the Central Coast medical world and the nation’s ever evolving testing capacity.
Right now, Ransohoff stated, all publicly owned and operated labs in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties are only capable of processing “dozens of tests a day.” Though the big corporate labs such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp have recently expanded that capacity by many thousands, their increased production must serve the entire nation. Mega-companies like Roche are projected to enlarge capacity significantly, but not immediately.
For the time being, Ransohoff said the demand for tests vastly eclipses the supply. Making matters worse, it’s flu season. “People who a year ago thought they had a bad cold or the flu now worry they have coronavirus,” he said. “Everybody wants to get tested. The question we face is who really needs to be tested?”