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South Florida gets upgrades in COVID-19 fight

While the decontamination facility is only located in Miami-Dade, the state is coordinating with FEMA to have additional Florida sites as needed.
 
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez tour a decontamination facility at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, May 6, 2020. The facility can clean 80,000 N95 respirator masks per day, at no charge to healthcare personnel and long-term care facilities. The system uses hydrogen peroxide vapor to clean used masks, which can be cleaned and reused up to 20 times.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez tour a decontamination facility at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, May 6, 2020. The facility can clean 80,000 N95 respirator masks per day, at no charge to healthcare personnel and long-term care facilities. The system uses hydrogen peroxide vapor to clean used masks, which can be cleaned and reused up to 20 times. [ SAMANTHA J. GROSS | Miami Herald ]
Published May 6, 2020

MIAMI GARDENS — The COVID-19 response in Miami-Dade got two upgrades Wednesday: the opening of a mask decontamination facility at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens and a mobile testing laboratory that can process 500 tests per day from long-term care facilities around the county.

“We believe this will be a game changer,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, who toured the facilities Wednesday.

The decontamination facility is made up of four shipping containers that can clean 80,000 N95 respirator masks per day, at no charge to healthcare personnel and hospitals or long-term care facilities. The system uses hydrogen peroxide vapor to clean used masks, which can be cleaned and reused up to 20 times. The facility is operated by the Battelle CCDS Critical Care Decontamination System, which was awarded a contract by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

While the decontamination facility is only located in Miami-Dade, the state is coordinating with FEMA to have additional Florida sites as needed.

DeSantis said the facility could help reduce the strain on the supply chain as well as the state’s reliance on countries like China for supplies.

“As many people know, this PPE was a major crunch, particularly in March — China had known what was going on,” he said. “They specifically bought up a lot of this stuff really to try to screw over the rest of the world, which they’re going to need to pay for doing that.”

He also introduced the state’s first mobile testing lab, which will process 500 COVID-19 tests per day using a 45-minute rapid Cepheid swab test. The mobile lab is outfitted by StatLab Mobile, a Miami-based blood testing company, and will start testing residents and staff at long-term care facilities in the county.

Cepheid tests involve taking a swab sample and inserting it into a special cartridge that already has reagents that test for COVID-19.

The technology had been used in mobile HIV testing in the past, and has been repurposed to do testing for COVID-19, DEM Director Jared Moskowitz said Wednesday.

The mobile lab strategy is to build a “hub and spoke model” where the lab sets up in an area near multiple long-term care facilities, DeSantis said. The lab will be operated by 10 National Guardsmen and 10 contracted nurses.

At the press conference Wednesday, DeSantis also elaborated on opening up antibody testing lanes at the drive-thru testing sites for healthcare workers and first responders. The serological tests could reveal whether a person has the antibodies to fight off COVID-19.

The antibody tests are now available at the Hard Rock Stadium site and will soon be available at other testing sites, like the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando and TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville.

The governor said the state is also working to partner with blood donation centers to conduct serological testing in order to “get a snapshot of data” of how many Floridians have the COVID-19 antibodies.

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The antibody tests purchased by the DeSantis administration are manufactured by a company called Cellex, with offices in North Carolina and China. In early April, the company’s tests were the first to be approved under an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, but the agency has since come under criticism for not validating the accuracy of antibody tests before granting the approvals.

According to a purchase order, the state has spent $4 million for 8,000 testing kits at $500 each from Cellex, which manufactures its products in North Carolina and Suzhou, China.

The tests work by measuring for antibodies produced in response to a novel coronavirus infection. Their accuracy is measured by how well they detect those antibodies (sensitivity) as well as how effective they are at ruling out other antibodies (specificity). The Cellex tests accurately detect the presence of the virus about 94% of the time and accurately rule out the antibodies about 95.5% of the time.

While those percentages might appear high, experts have pointed out that low prevalence of infections in the community make it more likely for the tests to produce false positives. Those results could be devastatingly misleading for people relying on the results to go back to work in high-risk environments. Given concerns over the accuracy of the tests, the FDA announced this week it would start validating them instead of relying on the company’s own measures.

As an article by Scientific American pointed out, if the Cellex tests are used on about 10,000 people where 1% are infected, it would correctly detect the antibodies in 94 out of 100 people who actually had them. But of the 9,900 uninfected, it would produce 396 false positives out of that population.

Even for people who are accurately tested for antibodies, it’s still unclear whether people develop immunity that would protect them from reinfection.

Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau staff writer Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report

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