NEW: North Attleboro Doctor Offering Drive Through Coronavirus Testing

Thursday, April 02, 2020

GoLocalProv News Team

 

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Dr. Ryan Welter. Photo: FB video

A medical facility in North Attleboro, Massachusetts is offering drive though coronavirus testing — with a new 15-minute COVID-19 test.

"We as a country need to ID the people who are positive, or have had [COVID-19] and don’t know they did — or are currently contracting the virus,” said Tristan Medical North Attleboro’s Dr. Ryan Welter. 

“There are 2 tests. There's a nasopharyngeal swab — that’s what you’ve seen at drive-throughs. That’s a PCR test, which identifies the DNA of the virus being secreted in nasal passages. You start shedding within several days of being infected. That is the preferred test — that has to be sent to a lab and there’s a turnaround time," said Welter. 

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"The President announced that there will be point-of-care tests — that is also viral testing, I’m assuming, to detect nucleic acid, the RNA that is in the virus. Those are just being rolled out and getting to hospitals first and other clinics later - probably still several weeks out."

Tristan Medical Approach

"We’ve gotten ahold of 15-minute point of care tests for IgG and IgM antibodies — these are antibodies that form in your blood when you have immunity," said Welter. "IgM [shows up] when you are actively fighting an infection. When you have long term immunity you build up IgG in your blood — which gives you jumpstarted immunity."

"This test comes back within 15 minutes. There's a control band and IgG bar and IgM bar. If you have neither bar you have no immunity to the virus at the time, which is not to say you may not have contracted in the past 5 days," he said.  "If you have IgG you had the infection and have beaten it and have assumed immunity. I don’t want to give people false hope of immunity however as this virus has not been tested for immunity in the community."

"If you have IgG and IgM you are actively fighting the virus," said Welter. "The benefit of this is if you have had symptoms for a week and you don’t know what’s going on — or you have allergies and you don’t know if its that or COVID - you can get tested."

"If you’re negative it doesn’t mean you’re not COVID positive. If you’re negative and we still need to know — we have enough swabs right now, but nationwide we’re running out of swabs," he added.

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High Volume Capacity

"We can do a lot of high volume testing — and determine who has immunity — and pigeon hole who has and doesn’t have it," said Welter. "We’ve done hundreds of tests so far. We just rolled this out [Monday] — they just arrived this week. We did a lot of the nasal swabs as well. We also now know that our office is COVID negative. We have about 8 people in Tristan Medical and they have all been tested."

Welter addressed the price point. 

"Obviously the President has said that COVID testing should be free to patients. There isn’t [an insurance code]. We don’t have a code for a test — we can’t even bill for it," he said. "We tell people, we want to do a telemedicine visit and get the necessary referral. We’re not screening you to see if you have or not have it — we’re just trying to get a pre-risk evaluation."

"You can be given a time to come for a drive-through test. We want to protect our health care workers -- we have the lab requisition in place," he said. "If we don’t take your insurance — we have a cash payment of $125 that covers all Telehealth and all the testing that we do. We don’t know what the test is going to cost."

Reporting to State

"If you’re negative and have a high test probability, we’ll do a swab — the nasal swabs are confirmatory," said Welter. "This test cannot tell an absolute negative."

"The idea of the rapid test is to get more people tested quickly and confirm accordingly.  We could do between 100-200 tests a day — but we’d run out of tests —  we’re getting more and more, but we're burning through tests fast."

Rhode Island Testing Ramping Up

Joseph Wendelken with the Rhode Island Department of Health outlined the State's approach on Wednesday. 

"We have set up respiratory clinics throughout the state. There are roughly a dozen of these respiratory clinics in Rhode Island. Respiratory clinics are primary care practices (among other places, such as health centers and urgent care facilities) set up specifically to evaluate patients suspected to have COVID-19. The goal is to ensure options for evaluating patients in need of a clinical assessment but not in need of ED level care. Some of them are swabbing."

 

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