Paramedics are dealing with a spike in requests for COVID-19 testing for kids.
Shane Muir is the Commander for Superior North EMS’ COVID-19 Task Force, which handles all coronavirus testing for patients under 13 years old. He says they are doing around 200 tests each day now that the school year has started.
He doesn’t think their system was equipped to handle this wave of tests.
“We knew there was going to be a surge, we just didn’t really know the size or the quantity or how fast it was going to come, and it took everybody by storm. We were all very surprised at how many students started coming through,” Muir admits.
Muir says more than 600 kids have been referred and are still waiting for a test, on top of the new requests that are coming in every day.
He says says getting through this backlog is a high priority, and the task force is working overtime.
“Just because we know there’s a lot of anxiety out there. There’s a lot of parents that are waiting for those tests, and their livelihoods rely on it. Also, [getting the result] reduces their anxiety, a lot of times they can’t get back to work [without a negative test] so there’s a lot of factors that really affect them,” Muir explains.
He says the task force is getting a lot of help from other health organizations to speed up testing and administrative work. The Commander adds the large workload hasn’t affected ambulance response times, because the two parts of EMS are kept separate.
