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For more than a year now, health care providers and health systems have been fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. And throughout that time, we&rsquo;ve given much-deserved thanks and appreciation to those who care for our communities day after day.
				Some health care professionals have been recognized more often than others, simply because they&rsquo;re more visible, but remember that there are many heroes, essential to our fight, diligently working behind the scenes.
				In observance of Medical Laboratory Professionals Week, I&rsquo;d like to honor some folks without whom the medical community would have struggled even more during the pandemic: our colleagues in lab medicine and diagnostics.
				When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infection, reached the United States, testing for the virus was inconvenient at best. Samples from patients suspected of having COVID-19 had to be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be analyzed and confirmed positive, which prolonged the diagnostic process and made health systems dependent on the government to track the spread of the virus.
				Without the ability to test in a timely manner, it becomes difficult to understand how many people are infected with a disease within a community, how quickly the disease is spreading, and how that transmission may be occurring.
				Enter the laboratory professionals.
				Across the country, diagnostics teams raced to develop their own testing technologies and submitted them to the CDC for approval. Geisinger was among the health systems who had success early on, and the ability to test and analyze in house was instrumental in the management of COVID-19 in our communities.
				While the lab is a controlled environment, with all of the necessary safety precautions and equipment in place, it still takes tremendous courage to handle samples of a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease every day. The technicians and scientists preparing and analyzing those specimens have endured the same uncertainty and anxiety regarding contracting COVID-19 and spreading it to loved ones as their counterparts in infectious diseases, critical care and emergency medicine.
				For their ingenuity and bravery, we thank them.
				At this time last year, roughly a month after Geisinger&rsquo;s microbiology team received its first presumptive positive &#8211; then, tests were still being sent to the CDC for confirmation &#8211; the lab was analyzing 200 to 250 samples a day from across the health system.
				Today, the lab tests an average of around 1,000 samples per day, and at the height of the pandemic, that rate was more than 2,500 samples. Geisinger&rsquo;s capacity for daily testing far exceeds even that number, but we&rsquo;re all hoping we never have to explore that capacity.
				What&rsquo;s as important and impressive as the amount of testing the diagnostics teams can accomplish each day is the efficiency with which they do so. From April 9 to April 16, 7,515 samples were tested across the Geisinger system. The average time from collection to result was 11.3 hours, and for inpatients, that turnaround was between 2 and 3 hours.
				That&rsquo;s a far cry from the days when samples had to be sent out for confirmation.
				So, when you turn on the news or visit the Pennsylvania Department of Health website, and you see a snapshot of how COVID-19 is affecting your community today, remember that it is laboratory professionals who got us to this point.
				They have their gloved fingers on the pulse of this pandemic.
				Dr. Alfred Casale, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is chief medical officer for surgical services for Geisinger and chair of the Geisinger Heart Institute. Readers may write to him via ae@www.timesleader.com.

To Your Health: Lab professionals instrumental during pandemic