Medical laboratory professionals work behind the scenes to fight Covid

This is Medical Laboratory Professionals Week

There is one group of medical professionals that played an extremely important role during the pandemic, but they work behind the scenes and sometimes get overlooked.
This is Medical Laboratory Professionals Week.

These are the people processing all those Covid-19 tests, along with all the other normal testing that hospitals and clinics do.

“We just felt like we had work to do, we had to do it as quickly as possible because it was very important for people to get results within hours versus days because it totally affected your life. Whether you could go to work, whether you could take your children to child care, if you could see anybody, like go shopping. We knew there was a very time sensitive need to get test results out to people,” says Rebecca Elder a medical technologist at Mayo Clinic Health System.

Mayo Clinic’s lab professionals performed more than 723-thousand tests last year.
Nearly, 58-thousand of those were Covid tests for southwestern Wisconsin.

Every COVID sample has extra processing steps compared to other lab testing.

Mayo Clinic had to install a second biosafety hood to handle and process COVID and Flu specimens in La Crosse for the safety of staff.

Due to difficulty in obtaining supplies for COVID collections and testing, the lab managed all supplies used for COVID outside of the normal supply chain process.

Mayo Clinic validated COVID testing on 3 different platforms, 2 rapid and one high throughput platform. They also validated COVID only and COVID combo tests for COVID/Flu.

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