PHOTOS: AHN Assembles COVID-19 Test Kits

90.5 WESA | By Katie Blackley

Published April 2, 2020 at 2:36 PM EDT

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Maria McCabe, left, and Sarah Wiswall, right, peel off informational stickers and place items into biohazard bags at Allegheny Health Network's downtown Highmark Health Penn Avenue place to create COVID-19 test kits on Thursday, April 2, 2020.

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A line of sterile media tubes stand in front of Korie Enscoe, director of quality for the Allegheny General Hospital's surgery center. The tubes will be used to hold sterile swabs that samples from potential COVID-19 patients.

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Blaine Dinkin, administrative fellow with Allegheny Health Network, seals a biohazard bag filled with contents for testing people who may have contracted the novel coronavirus.

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Health care staff says they heard about AHN's test kit creation earlier this week and eagerly jumped at the opportunity to help.

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At least one staffer was monitoring how long it took each worker to create test kits to make the process more efficient.

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Gwen Weil, director of clinical data abstraction at AHN, says the assembly "feels like Lucy in the candy factory," referencing the 1952 I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and her best friend Ethel work on a candy assembly line.

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The walls of the auditorium were lined with boxes each containing at least 50 of these test kits inside biohazard bags.

Katie Blackley / 90.5 WESA

Allegheny Health Network began assembling COVID-19 test kits in its downtown Highmark Health Penn Avenue Place building this week. Dozens of tables with medical staffers lined the auditorium of the building filled with sterile media tubes, swabs, instructions, and biohazard bags.

"Once the provider swabs the patient, it goes into the tube and it gets sent to the lab," said Korie Enscoe, director of quality for the Allegheny General Hospital surgery center. "It's actually pretty fun."

Medical facilities across the country say they're short on test kits. AHN officials say the provider wants to create 6,000 new kits by the end of the week and "thousands more in the weeks ahead."