San Miguel County on Thursday restated its commitment to a first-of-its-kind partnership with a company providing free COVID-19 testing to anyone who lives in Telluride or the surrounding area, reversing an announcement earlier in the week that health officials were suspending the project.
The county on Tuesday said in a now-deleted news release that it was temporarily shutting down testing because the lab of United Biomedical Inc., which is providing the tests, had been “compromised due to virus.” Hours later, United Biomedical said it was not compromised and that its labs were “constantly working around the clock to process results from our friends and neighbors.”
San Miguel County walked back its suspension Thursday afternoon and apologized for confusion caused by earlier statements.
“The indication that the lab was compromised was unintentionally misleading and the county apologizes for any confusion it created,” the news release issued Thursday reads. “San Miguel County remains confident in the quality of test results from UBI.”
(Health officials have declined to comment further as they work through containment and testing plans for the county, which on Thursday reported its 11th case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.)
San Miguel County and United Biomedical made international news last month with a plan to screen everyone in the county twice with a new blood test. A subsidiary of the company owned by part-time Telluride residents Mei Mei Hu and her husband, Lou Reese, created the test and offered 15,000 to the county free of charge.
Hu and Reese said they would send samples voluntarily provided by the county’s approximately 8,000 residents to United Biomedical labs in California and New York.
The testing was announced before San Miguel County had any confirmed coronavirus cases among residents. The county was among the first in Colorado to announce a lockdown as it prepared for contagion in the box canyon of Telluride, population 2,500, and other rural corners of the county.
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