ON THE COVER Humboldt County Public Health Laboratory staff member Alyssa McCloud catalogs incoming tests. Courtesy of Humboldt County Public Health
In the Lab
Behind Humboldt’s efforts to expand COVID-19 testing capacity By Thadeus Greenson thad@northcoastjournal.com
B
efore the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Humboldt County Public Health Laboratory kept a pretty low profile. Tucked inside a nondescript building on Eureka’s I Street, the small, cramped lab housed those doing the relatively unexciting work of typing influenza strains, monitoring for outbreaks of communicable diseases like chicken pox, measles and mumps. It tested shellfish for toxins and tested drinking water. Sometimes it processed rabies tests. The lab received some brief notoriety — in public health circles, anyway — in July of 2019, when someone sent envelopes of white powder to Pelican Bay State Prison, forcing the quarantine of 116 people. A local hazmat team was sent in to retrieve the substance and it was sent to the lab on I Street for testing. There, Lab Manager Jeremy Corrigan and staff worked through the night, ultimately confirming the substance to be ricin powder, a toxic biological agent. The following day, an FBI agent arrived on a C-130 military transport aircraft to pick up the samples, according to an article on the Association of Public Health Laboratories’ blog. As wild as the story is, the prospect of the lab being called into action for such a thing is a big part of what’s kept it afloat in recent decades, buoyed by counterterrorism grants and funds in the wake of 9/11 as a regional resource in this remote, rural stretch of Northern California. But few outside public health circles likely imagined a day when the small laboratory would prove a linchpin in a massive, countywide effort to curb the spread of
Caption Credit
“We are working with one of the most sensitive tests that’s out there and available, and one of the most specific tests that’s out there and available.” the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. But under Corrigan’s direction, the lab has ramped up its testing capacity more than 10-fold
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NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020 • northcoastjournal.com
in a matter of months, providing the quick test results that enable effective contact investigations that identify and isolate positive COVID-19 cases, limiting spread of the disease. “We have been evolving over the past six months,” Corrigan says over the phone one recent afternoon, explaining the next step in that evolution will be the opening of a new laboratory through a first-of-itskind partnership with United Indian Health Services, county of Del Norte, Humboldt State University and the state of California that is projected to more than double local testing capacity. The new facility is slated to open just as cases are surging on the North Coast, as they are throughout the state and country. Humboldt County confirmed 328 new COVID-19 cases in November, accounting for 37 percent of its total cases to date. And local health officials expect the surge to continue, fearful that gatherings and travel over the Thanksgiving holiday will cause a further spike in case numbers over the coming weeks, making the ability to deliver fast, accurate test results all the more important.
It’s not that the Humboldt County
Public Health Laboratory didn’t do genetic testing before COVID-19, it just didn’t do much of it and was never designed to do it on a large scale. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing is a complex process that amplifies small segments of DNA, the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for all living things, by copying them, making it easier for analysts to identify various attributes, including viruses like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. “[Prior to COVID-19], we’d do one or two PCRs in a day,” Corrigan said. “I’d do maybe 120 PCRs throughout the entire calendar year.” The lab can now do up to 300 in a single day, the result of months of work to increase automation and capacity at each step in the testing process. COVID-19 samples come into the laboratory in the form of swabs that have been wiped deep inside someone’s nose
