A new test in town: Confluence Health provides some patients with rapid COVID-19 tests

MOSES LAKE — Confluence Health clinics, in Moses Lake and elsewhere in the state, have begun providing a less-intrusive type of coronavirus test that produces results in minutes, rather than days.

It’s called an antigen test, and this particular type is nearly as accurate as the slower, more invasive test it’s replacing, said Dr. Jason Lake, chief medical officer at Confluence Health, in a recent interview.

Since the early days of the pandemic, coronavirus tests provided in Washington have typically been polymerase chain reaction tests, or PCR tests, which can detect with near certainty whether or not a person is sickened with COVID-19. Both Confluence’s antigen test and other PCR tests are conducted with a nasal swab, but the more widely used PCR test is pushed much further back into the nose, which can cause discomfort.

Those tests are considered the gold standard in accuracy, Lake said, but they require sophisticated equipment that isn’t available in most hospitals.

Instead, the tests are sent away to labs across the state, where health officials have reported that they can get results back in 24 hours at the best of times or it could take longer than a week at the worst.

Antigen tests are considerably quicker. In less than 30 minutes, a nurse can walk out to a patient’s car, verify their information, conduct the test, walk the swab up to the in-house lab and get results.

However, while positive antigen tests are considered accurate, negative results are often considered less reliable, according to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But not all antigen tests are created equally, Lake said.

“The problem with antigen testing as a category, there’s a wide variability in reliability with different antigen tests,” he said.

While it is still possible to get a negative result from the test and in fact be infected with the coronavirus, it’s unlikely, and worth the faster results, Lake added.

The quicker turnaround hasn’t necessarily meant Confluence is conducting more tests than it had previously, Lake said.

Their antigen tests are in most cases still only available for presurgical patients, symptomatic Confluence employees and people who need a negative COVID-19 test before they can travel to certain states with travel restrictions, such as Alaska and Hawaii, said Confluence nurse Cheryl Adams. That might change come flu season, however, when the test could be adapted to detect both types of virus simultaneously, said Gregg Fletcher, vice president of Grant County clinics operations for Confluence Health.

But faster results can already have some important impacts, especially for presurgical patients, Lake said.

“Before, oftentimes we had to test three or four day prior to surgery,” Lake said. “Now we can shorten that interval.”

Quicker turnaround times also mean that contact tracers can begin to work with positive tests sooner to find out who the infected person might have been in contact with, hopefully containing the spread, he added.

Confluence Health sees its own benefits from the speedier test, which allows the organization to check sick employees for the coronavirus and potentially clear them to return to work sooner, Fletcher said.

“Between illness and the back-to-school issues, kids being at home, it’s going to be hard on staffing regardless, so the more people who aren’t sick that we have, the better,” Fletcher said.