Henry Ford’s lab is first in Michigan to begin processing coronavirus samples

Wearing blue lab coats and rubber gloves, microbiologists bustled through a lab at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit on Tuesday morning, charged with a new mission: To test as many patients as possible for COVID-19, the disease caused by novel coronavirus. 

Henry Ford Health System became the first hospital system in Michigan to adapt the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s test kits, and develop a way to test samples collected from its patients in its own lab — and deliver results on the same day.

It now has the capacity to run 100 tests a day — with priority given to patients who are already hospitalized, those in the emergency room and health care workers — and hopes to be able to ramp up testing so it can handle as many as 1,000 samples a day. Results of its in-house tests are available in three to four hours, if working at optimal speed. 

“They’ve been working around the clock,” said Dr. Richard Zarbo, chairman of pathology and laboratory medicine for Henry Ford Health System. 

Of the first batch of patients it tested Monday, about 10% came back positive for COVID-19, Zarbo said, noting that the tests were run on hospitalized patients who were already symptomatic, and at high risk for COVID-19. 

Dozens of red-capped vials were lined up in a rack on a counter top in the lab — all new samples ready for COVID-19 testing. More specimens were stored into pink buckets in a refrigerator. One was labeled in-patient, another emergency room and a third outpatient. 

The hope is that Henry Ford’s lab can help reduce the strain on the public health system, and give a boost to a nation that has lagged in surveillance and testing for the virus amid an outbreak that has reached pandemic proportions. 

“The testing capacity as of yesterday across the United States was 36,800 tests per day,” Zarbo said. “That’s 36,800 and we’ve got a population of more than 300 million. 

“So we contributed another hundred to that. The entire state laboratory systems across the U.S. do 3,100 tests a day. That’s 3,100 tests for 300 million people.

“If we don’t have more laboratories, academic laboratories, sophisticated laboratories like Henry Ford doing this, and contributing, we’re not going to be able to keep up with the testing requirement.

“If we don’t know what we’re dealing with, then everybody gets the disease. How do you understand who you have to isolate?” 

In Michigan, 65 people had tested positive as of Tuesday afternoon for the virus. Nationally, there were about 5,700 cases and 94 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Global Case Tracker.

Zarbo applauded Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for taking fast action to restrict large public gatherings and closing schools, bars and restaurants, especially knowing that today is St. Patrick’s Day, which usually draws out hoards of revelers. 

“That would be the worst thing that we could do is to continue to spread it unknowingly,” Zarbo said. “So we basically try now to treat everybody like they have COVID-19.” 

Linoj Samuel, Ph.D., and division head of the Henry Ford microbiology department of pathology, said the testing situation in Michigan and nationally is slowly catching up to demand, but it’s been a struggle. 

“I know that that the state lab has a backlog of samples,” he said. “They’ve tried their best to help us in terms of providing samples for validation … and that’s been that’s been a very good collaboration and we talk to them almost every day.”

But he said it’s vital for people to understand that as hospital systems, including Henry Ford, launch drive-up clinics where people can have samples taken for COVID-19 testing, they still can’t test everybody who wants to be tested right now.

“It doesn’t mean you can just drive up and get it,” he said. “A lot of perfectly healthy people I’ve heard have shown up in the drive-through and been turned away, which is the correct thing to do.” 

Instead, people who have COVID-19 symptoms such as fever and cough should stay home and contact their health care provider to get instructions about what to do next. 

Robert Tibbetts, Ph.D., the associate director of microbiology at Henry Ford Health System, explained that the plan is to run the samples of the sickest patients first.

“We’re prioritizing the in-house testing for the inpatients and the emergency department patients because they’re the most critically ill,” said Tibbetts. “Your patients are coming in and they have a flu-like symptoms. They would send those people home and say quarantine for four or five days until we get your results back.”

The people whose symptoms are not severe enough for hospitalization are now being sent to outside labs for testing, and results come back in days rather than hours. 

Tests for health care workers also get fast-tracked, Tibbetts said. 

“It’s crucial that we get their results quickly because of the potential for spread,” he said. 

Right now, the process is very time-consuming, labor intensive, and requires highly specialized microbiologists who are trained in molecular virology. But the hope is to automate the process so it can move much more quickly, and deliver results for up to 1,000 patients a day. 

“The second we realized that we could pull the trigger on this, that’s when we did it,” Tibbetts said. “That’s when we got volunteers. … and mobilized everything. They stayed late, worked overtime, came in on the weekend to make sure the test was done right.” 

For now, he said, there are enough supplies to continue running tests and collecting samples. 

“There are reports of potential decrease in the supply quantities,” he said. “I know that a lot of the vendors are ramping up production. I think the caveat is that we need to really focus our testing on the right people, because if we don’t, we will run out. 

“And when we run out, the people that suffer are the ones who really, really need the testing, and that’s the most vulnerable population. So we can’t we over-test. We need to know what’s in the community, but we can’t overdo it because we will run out.”

Contact health reporter Kristen Shamus: kshamus@freepress.com or 313-222-5997. She can also be reached by encrypted email at kristenshamus@protonmail.com. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story will update throughout the day, as more information is available.