Nantucket Coronavirus Testing Advisory | April 9, 2020

• The coronavirus testing criteria continues to evolve, and in some cases it changes day to day, but it has become less restrictive from the time we launched the drive-through evaluation site on March 16.

• Our current testing capacity essentially allows us to test all those patients who the clinical team feel have a need to be tested. If you are experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness, such as cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, and fever, please come to the drive-through evaluation site. The turnaround time for test results has been reduced to 24 hours in most cases.

• Patients coming to the drive through should know that specimens are sent out daily, weather permitting, at 3 p.m. to the mainland, so there’s a faster turnaround time if patients are swabbed before then. Coming after 3 p.m. means turnaround time could be around 48 hours.

• The hours for the drive-through evaluation site remain 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

• Please note that this Sunday, April 12^th, the drive-through will be open 8:30 a.m. to noon, and closed in the afternoon. Regular hours will resume on Monday.

• This week NCH will be able to launch some limited in-house testing utilizing the Cepheid analyzer in the NCH lab.

• Given that our initial capacity will be small, this service will be used in very limited circumstances when it can make a significant difference in patient care.

• We hope this in-house testing capacity will expand in the weeks ahead but there is no timeframe.