Why Is America’s Testing System Still Not Running At Full Throttle?
Politico examines the reasons why, despite national outcry over the lack of testing, the U.S. government still can't meet the surging demand. The FDA did say, however, that states should get a boost this week after it approved at-home tests. Meanwhile, state officials start building contact tracing networks, which experts say are needed in addition to increased testing if states want to reopen.
It鈥檚 hard to tell from watching President Donald Trump and members of his Coronavirus Task Force just how many people can be tested for coronavirus in the U.S. and whether there鈥檚 enough testing capacity to reopen the economy. Task force officials have been citing the millions of swabs and test tubes now in production as manufacturers ramp up capacity. They handed out lists of labs in each state to governors this week, suggesting that states just haven鈥檛 been asking labs to do the work. But doubling the number of tests conducted from the current 1 million per week, as the White House recommends, is far more complicated than that. (Lim and Ehley, 4/22)
States could increase their testing capabilities as soon as this week, including the use of at-home testing kits, the head of the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday. The FDA this week gave the green light to the first coronavirus test that allows patients to collect nasal samples at home. LabCorp, a North Carolina-based company, had said on Tuesday that it was given an emergency-use authorization for its Pixel home collection kit. (Beachum and McGinley, 4/22)
New York state will launch massive testing programs as it prepares to relax restrictions on businesses that were implemented in response to the novel coronavirus crisis, officials said Wednesday. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will provide more than $10 million to design and help set up a tracing program that would allow governments to track down whom infected people have come into contact with in New York City, as well as neighboring counties and states, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. (Vielkind, 4/22)
If life is going to return to anything like normal in the next few months, experts say we're going to need a lot more "contact tracers." Those are the public health workers who get in touch with someone who's tested positive for a disease, to find out who else he or she might have been in contact with. It's a long-standing practice for illnesses such as tuberculosis and AIDS, and now, as states re-open, it'll be a crucial tool for keeping a lid on the coronavirus. (Kaste, 4/22)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Wednesday that the state is planning to train up to 10,000 contact tracers amid the coronavirus pandemic.聽Expanding聽contact tracing and testing is one of six indicators聽Newsom聽said last week would drive the state鈥檚 decision to gradually modify portions of the stay-at-home order. (Klar, 4/22)
When Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, suggested recently that the state might use residents鈥 cellphone data to trace the spread of the coronavirus, opponents on both the left and right were aghast. The American Civil Liberties Union raised the specter of an intrusive government prying into people鈥檚 personal lives. Republican state lawmakers drafted a letter imploring the governor 鈥渘ot to attempt to track personally-identifiable cellular phone location data, absent specific user consent or a judicial warrant.鈥 (Povich, 4/23)
Serologic testing helped scientists establish connections between two people with COVID-19 from Wuhan, China, to three clusters in Singapore, according to a study yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Also, a study today in The Journal of Infectious Diseases found that four of eight COVID-19 cases in three family clusters in China were asymptomatic or had only mild symptoms. (Van Beusekom, 4/22)
