The federal government has given Northwell Health the okay to start using a new testing method for COVID according to WCBS 880.
The test will be conducted at a 100,000-square-foot facility in Lake Success and is said to be a semi-automatic test as opposed to a strictly by-hand process. According to the Lab’s Executive Director Dr. Dwayne Breining, the switch from manual to semi-automatic will allow technicians to test 90 to 100 samples daily.
“It allows the tech instead of having to do the pipetting and the measure at every step of the way they can simply put a patient’s sample on that cartridge and then that cartridge goes into a machine,” said Breining.
The goal is to get permission from the FDA to make testing completely automatic, allowing for thousands of tests to be conducted.
At this point, there are 28 cases in Nassau County with 20 of them in the Town of Hempstead. There are two in the Town of North Hempstead and three in the Town of Oyster Bay. There are six cases in Suffolk County, with one in Southold and two in Brookhaven.
In New York, there’s a total of 121 cases and the number is expected to go up because of easier testing methods.
