A lack of nasal swabs has rendered Colorado’s 10,000-a-day supply of test kits for determining who has contracted COVID-19 mostly useless.

That problem is one of the top issues a high-powered group of influential business leaders and public officials are helping Gov. Jared Polis tackle as COVID-19 shutters businesses and confines residents to their homes across the state.

Who’s who on the governor’s COVID-19 response teams

Polis created the Innovation Response Team late last month and tasked the group with developing a statewide system for tracking the spread of the virus and supporting the responses of public agencies and institutions. Polis also wants the team to create “a suite of services for citizens under isolation or quarantine.”

The work by that team could help determine whether current social distancing measures Polis has put in place by executive order can be relaxed. Polis has stressed that increasing testing for the virus and contact tracing are among the six key measures needed to stabilize the situation in Colorado.

Sarah Tuneberg, who founded Denver-based Geospiza, a firm that evaluates data to guide environmental disaster response, took over as director of the Innovation Response Team about three weeks ago.

The team is not working on its own, she stressed, and is coordinating efforts with a wide range of academic institutions, private businesses and public agencies.

“We’re part of the soup to get this incredible, important thing done.”

In addition to trying to bolster the state’s virus testing capacity, the team she leads also is helping hospitals locate additional ventilators for critically ill patients, supporting research into whether the plasma of patients who have recovered from COVID-19 might strengthen the immune system of others and working on other thorny issues.

Tuneberg said that the goal of enhancing testing for the virus remains difficult.

“It is almost impossible to get swabs and almost impossible to get certain re-agents to conduct the test,” she said. “I wish, as anyone does, that testing was as simple as pricking a finger.”

Colorado asked the federal government to supply at least a couple hundred thousand nasal swabs, which state officials believe are needed for a robust testing program. Instead, the state received, at most 2,000, Tuneberg said.

“The challenge is the entire world needs this thing that nobody needed before and all at the same time,” Tuneberg said.

The response team has reached out to South Korean and Japanese markets in an attempt to bridge the gap, she said. In addition, it is coordinating efforts with the Colorado State Lab and researchers at Colorado State University to determine whether sterilized Q-tips, which are easier to obtain than nasal swabs, will work with the test kits, Tuneberg said.

The Innovation Response Team also reached out to non-hospital facilities to help find additional ventilators in the state, contacting veterinarians, doctors and other sources, Tuneberg said. That survey found an additional 100 ventilators that hospitals can use if they face shortages.

So far, estimates that the state might need 7,000 additional ventilators haven’t borne out as social distancing measures have helped hospitals maintain capacity to treat COVID-19 patients, Tuneberg said. In addition, the state this week began distributing 100 ventilators to hospitals that it received from the federal government’s national stockpile of medical equipment.

“At this point, we do not have a shortage, and everyone who needs a ventilator is on a ventilator,” Tuneberg said.

Ventilators may be adequate for now, but other issues remain. The Innovation Response Team is working on assessing the needs and gaps in social services now that people are hunkered down in their homes, she said.

“If you do test positive and you do need to stay home, how do we get your needs met?” Tuneberg said is another critical issue that is getting probed.

Whatever the future brings and whatever solutions to COVID-19 the Innovation Response Teams help uncover, Tuneberg is sure of one thing.

“We are in a new world,” she said. “We’re rapidly working on understanding the implications of that and how that changes the fabric of our communities. We won’t ever go back to what we had before.

“We are fundamentally altered.”