UW Medicine’s COVID-19 testing at Ballard at 5415 Ballard Ave NW and two others will be closed Tuesday due to understaffing and a large number of positive cases.
In addition to staffing issues, the Ballard, Seattle City Hall and Sammamish Lake State Park sites will close due to high positivity rates that are slowing down the overall process.
Also on Tuesday, UW Medicine will begin restricting operations at all of its verification sites to allow only other people with known symptoms or exposure to check on its other sites. use any of UW Medicine’s verification sites beginning January 4.
At a press conference, UW Medicine’s president of laboratory medicine and pathology, Dr. Geoff Baird, said such higher case rates mean UW labs can no longer “bundle” controls as they did. patterns from a verification site and combine an extraction of each pattern to determine if there is a positive case.
If the result is negative, go ahead and all 4 or five of the patterns may be negative; however, if they locate a positive case, they go back and review each pattern individually.
But when positivity skyrockets and both groups test positive for COVID, group verification becomes futile. They have to check the pattern individually, which slows down the overall process. And right now, positive instances are skyrocketing about 40% for the Seattle area.
UW Medicine will continue to operate at its other nine sites; Aurora, Shoreline and the university district are other nearby features for North Seattle. You can make an appointment at some other UW Medicine verification site through this link.
The Ballard site is also closed today (December 31) due to winter conditions. It is unclear how long the Ballard site will remain closed, however, we will keep you informed of any new information.
King County COVID has a full list of other testing features in Seattle.
Photo: The Ballard check in August 2021 Photo via Ballard Alliance
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