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PHO Discusses Expanded COVID-19 Testing in Johnson County

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The expansion of testing for the general population of Johnson County isn’t likely to be very useful in the fight against the pandemic locally.

That’s according to Public Health Officer Dr. Mark Schueler, who was asked about testing during the most recent Corona virus media briefing Friday.

Dr. Schueler said in these situations we need to test healthcare workers in the nursing home and hospital and get those positive people out of there.

But, to run 20 or 30 tests on random people in the community to get more data would be expensive, time-consuming, and probably wouldn’t help the situation.

He explained the testing process.

Dr. Schueler said although there is a belief at the Federal level of a need for testing and data, the practical side of this is it isn’t very easy to utilize.

It may be interesting to look at and talk about, but what’s really more valuable is knowing how many sick people, especially seriously ill people we have, and that’s what we’ll be looking for.

Johnson County currently has no sick people, and have had relatively few so far, which is good he said, but moving forward he believes local data should focus on the numbers of sick people in the community.

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