Coronavirus results in hours

Three weeks ago, the UTRGV Center for Vector-Borne Disease was certified by the Clinical Lab Information Amendment as the UT Health RGV Clinical Lab. The lab is conducting testing for the coronavirus.  

Leading the testing, Biology assistant professor John Thomas said the UTRGV School of Medicine originally contacted him to help package samples.  

“What was going to be just me helping them pack a box and send it out, turned into, ‘Well, could you do all the testing?’” Thomas said. “That’s really how this whole thing started.” 

He said the lab received materials for testing about a month ago. 

“After a few days of setting up the assay, and making sure they were working properly, we started accessing samples from the UT Health RGV Clinic,” Thomas said. “They had set up [drive-thru testing sites] in Brownsville and in Edinburg to start looking for COVID-19, and swabs they had collected from people that might be infected.” 

The staff consists of three full-time faculty and 11 to 12 graduate students. 

He said the university should be proud of the graduate students and the efforts they put on behalf of the university and community. 

“They have really given 150% in this kind of time when no one wants to go anywhere,” Thomas said. “People are scared. They don’t know what’s going to happen, and they haven’t complained. They just come in. They’ve done the work, and they’ve done an outstanding job. We’ve had a lot of our results validated by external labs and we have yet to get a test wrong. And, we’ve done over 1,200 samples so far.” 

 Asked how the test is conducted, he replied a nurse or doctor will essentially stick a cotton swab up the patient’s nose and then transport the sample to the lab. 

“We then extract any of the genetic material on the sample or on the swab,” Thomas said. “We extract that off the swab and then we use a test called RT-PCR [reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction] to genetically determine whether or not we have the virus there.” 

He said they can determine whether the test is positive or negative for a single sample in about six or seven hours. 

“We’ve been doing about 100 to 120 samples a day and we, usually, can report the result of the samples in about 18 hours,” Thomas said. “So, pretty fast turn around. But all of that, a lot of our speed, is because we didn’t get 50,000 Q-tips to test in a single day, like some of these very large diagnostic labs did when this pandemic first occurred. So, we don’t have a backlog from two months ago that we’re trying to work through. So, we got a pretty fast turnaround time, right now.”

Michael Dobbs, UTRGV School of Medicine chief medical officer, said Thomas was a logical candidate to start testing for the coronavirus. 

“Dr. Thomas is a virologist, and he already had experience in testing for mosquito-borne viruses in his laboratory,” Dobbs said. 

He said the School of Medicine is training the next generation of physicians to be ready to treat the disease through their residency program and the medical schools. 

Juan Garcia Jr., a graduate student and lab manager, said this is a brand new and challenging experience for him. 

“It all happened really fast,” Garcia said. “What was going on outside in the real world, it was starting to affect everyone down here [in the Rio Grande Valley] and our lab decided, as a group, to assist in the best way possible.” 

He said as the lab manager his duties include administrative work, collecting data and making sure the lab is moving forward.

“[Thomas] has to be the one doing all the paperwork and he’s in the office at all times,” Garcia said. “So, I’m the one at the site everyday making sure that testing [is] going on and the lab is moving forward, and the research is getting done. That’s basically my purpose.”