OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – The Oklahoma State Department of Health plans to do its own Conavirus testing.

The state currently sends the samples off to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.

“The current turnaround time is about 3 to 4 days,” said Laurence Burnsed, State Epidemiologist.

Burnsed says the kit the state will use for testing in its labs was developed by the CDC.

“The kit is then manufactured to where it is sent out to all the state public health laboratories including Oklahoma. We receive the supplies, the reagents, and the specific test kits from CDC,” he said.

Burnsed says the kits and supplies themselves will come at no cost to the state.

“The real cost to us and for the state would be the personnel time of the laboratory and that need to conduct the testing itself, which is something we’ve absorbed into our other testing protocols,” he said.

No timeline has been set for when testing will be up and running, but Burnsed says they expect to be able to do testing in about a week.

“We want to assure that the test is actually going to be working as expected, which is why we have to go through that process,” he said.

Click here to learn more about Oklahoma’s status on Coronavirus.