By Alexander Nazaryan
March 10, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Despite vows to drastically
expand the coronavirus testing regime, federal and
state public health authorities have tested only
6,563 people for the coronavirus as of Tuesday
morning, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and numbers provided by all
50 states.
That count includes people tested by the federal
government and by state laboratories. Because those
laboratories may not always report people who tested
negative for the coronavirus, the true number of
people tested is probably somewhat higher.
Confusion about that exact number persists even
at the highest reaches government. Earlier on
Tuesday, Department of Health and Human Services
Secretary Alex Azar said he couldn’t provide the
figure. “We don’t know exactly how many because
hundreds of thousands of our tests have gone out to
private labs and hospitals that currently do not
report in to CDC,” he said in a CNN appearance.
That number stands in stark contrast to
the promises made by leading members of the Trump
administration’s coronavirus task force, who
have variously asserted that 75,000 people would be
tested by last week’s end and that laboratories
across the United States would have the capacity to
conduct 1.5 million tests by the beginning of this
week.
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Neither claim appears to yet be close to
realized, angering some Washington
lawmakers. “We are in a crisis, and there
are questions about our preparedness and
ongoing response efforts,” Rep. Rosa
DeLauro, D-Conn., said on Tuesday morning.
“I’m very concerned — and, I think, we all
are — about our nation’s capabilities for
coronavirus. Other countries have been
testing thousands of people for weeks, but
the U.S. is woefully behind the curve.”
The nation’s ability to test for the coronavirus
was hampered early on because a test created by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was found
to have a contaminated reagent, meaning that one of
its three markers — the one that would indicate a
person was not infected — was not
operational.
The CDC eventually corrected that error but also
had to grapple with the fact that by keeping the
coronavirus tests within its own purview, it was
severely limiting the numbers who could be tested.
It has since allowed private and university
laboratories to conduct testing, while also vowing
to stock public health labs with sufficient
quantities of the coronavirus test.
Still, the lag is evident, robbing
epidemiologists of precious days as they seek to
contain the spread of the disease.
Private laboratories are expected to intensify
their own testing efforts, but as of Monday morning,
Mark S. Birenbaum, who heads the National
Independent Laboratory Association, said he was
uncertain of how many of his members had begun to
test for the coronavirus.
“Many have not,” he wrote in a text message.
CDC spokesman Richard Quartarone said that as of
Monday evening, the Atlanta-based public health
agency had tested 1,707 people. On March 3, that
number had been 1,200 people, which means the CDC
has tested 507 people in the last week, or about 72
per day.
In a congressional hearing on Tuesday, CDC
Director Robert Redfield, MD, said that state
laboratories had tested 4,856 people. The source of
that statistic is not clear: The day before, both
the White House and the CDC said that information
was not available. An industry group representing
public laboratories also said it had not yet
gathered the data.
State laboratories had tested 3,280 people as of
Monday evening. That number is derived from the
COVID Tracking Project, started by Denver-based
venture capitalist Jeff Hammerbacher and journalists
from the Atlantic, put the number of people tested
by state labs at a somewhat lower 3,280. The data
compiled by Hammerbacher slightly understates the
number of people tested, since some states report
only positive test results.
South Korea, by contrast, has performed well over
100,000 tests. An analysis by Business Insider
found that
the U.S. lags badly behind other nations in the
share of its population that has been tested (the
analysis, however, appears to exclude people who
were tested by state labs).
At the same time, public laboratories cannot be
relied upon to carry the brunt of the testing
burden. On the whole, Michelle Forman, a
spokesperson for the Association of Public Health
Laboratories, estimates that public laboratories
will be able to test only 10,000 patients per day,
and that is when all 100 facilities are running at
full capacity.
The White House did not respond to a request for
comment.
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