DALLAS – Dallas County is ending its contract with the company that runs one of the largest COVID-19 test sites in North Texas.
Dallas may not use private vendors to run test sites anymore due to concerns about timeliness and accuracy.
Honu Management Group began administering tests at Eastfield College in Mesquite earlier this month.
Dallas County commissioners used money from the federal CARES Act to pay Honu because it took too long for the federal-run site to get test results back. Honu promised results within 72 hours.
Earlier this month, commissioners questioned the company’s long lead time and the accuracy of test results.
People being tested in Dallas wait longer to get their results, despite a 40 percent drop in people being tested.
Judge Clay Jenkins of Dallas County said Hony, the private company that was hired for millions of dollars to perform tests on one site, took three days to simply get tests to a lab in Austin for processing.
“You could have taken them there faster in a backpack on the bike than they got them there,” Jenkins said.
Dallas has canceled its $ 14 million contract with Honu. The city says it promised a turnaround time of 72 hours from the test result. Instead, the average wait for test results from Dallas’ public test sites is six days, according to the county.
Dallas County began investigating the issue after FOX 4 reported last week that father and son, Cliff and Chris Cozby, had been waiting more than a week to get results from the Honu site.
“Dr. Fauci says that if you do not get your results back within five days, it becomes really less valuable to track contact, “Jenkins said.
Dallas Mayor Dallas Johnson launched a review on how Honu won the multi-million dollar contract after a number of concerns were reported, including an unusually low 7 percent positive rating on Honu’s test site compared to much higher rates among others, as 17 percent positive on the Parkland test site.
A statement from the mayor’s office said on Tuesday, “We went ahead with the move to a private federal government supplier because it would be father, so longer waiting times are apparently unacceptable.”
Now, Parkland Hospital will operate tests on the site of Eastfield College, which Honu uses to run.
“We want to get those results. We want them to be accurate and timely, ”said Jenkins.
It is unclear at this time how much of the contract the city of Dallas had paid out. The province has not paid any of its share of the deal.
