• Faecal calprotectin -routine requests discontinued for safety and operational reasons. Urgent requests made by gastroenterology will be processed for patients that are not suspected or confirmed to have covid19
• Oral fluid drugs of abuse screening (DOA) - discontinued for safety reasons. If a DOA screen is absolutely necessary a urine DOA screen should be sent.
• Pleural fluid biochemistry analysis (including pleural fluid pH, LDH, glucose and protein) is no longer being provided in the laboratory for covid19 positive patients due to a possible infection risk to lab staff.  Pleural fluid pH and glucose measurements for covid19 positive patients should be carried out on a gas analyser within a covid19 area in the main hospital.    For covid19 negative patients pleural fluid samples will continue to be processed in the main laboratory.  For any patients with suspected covid19 pleural fluid samples will be stored by the lab and only processed if the Covid19 PCR results are negative.

Services are constrained but at manageable levels

SARS CoV-2 tests are the laboratory main priority and we are currently processing 200 requests a day and potentially this will be 500 per day.

The following routine tests are reduced or stopped

• Full respiratory viral PCR testing is suspended but is available for few key areas, ICU, Transplant and haematology.
• HIV/HCV Viral Load:  is only being done once a week as opposed to twice. 
•  HBV assay:   assay is only being done once every 2 weeks as opposed to every week.
•  Quantitative CMV, BKV EBV is being done twice per week as opposed to 4 times a week. 
•  Syphilis IgM and TPPA assays are suspended for now. RPR will be only additional test.
•  No Mumps PCR testing (Store)
•  CSF testing is unaffected

Genital and Skin swabs are not being tested for HSV and VZV by PCR.