By Alexander Nazaryan
March 12, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
WASHINGTON — Despite
insistent promises from the Trump administration,
coronavirus testing in the United States appears to
be proceeding with a marked lack of urgency. An
examination of state and federal records by Yahoo
News finds that American states are, on average,
testing fewer than 100 people per day — while the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had
tested fewer than 100 people total in the first two
days of this week.
Meanwhile, a single private lab is performing
tests, according to a trade group representing such
facilities. The administration has repeatedly said
that private enterprise would play a critical role
in making sure that all Americans who need a
coronavirus test receive one.
U.S. officials on Tuesday were faced with an
onslaught of questions from members of Congress,
amid reports of South Korea’s drive-through
coronavirus testing locations.
“This is not a problem we can test our way out
of,” said Stephen Redd, MD, head of the CDC’s Office
of Public Health Preparedness and Response, in
testimony on Wednesday. It was an admission that, in
a nation of 320 million, testing every person will
be impossible.
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Redd also revealed in his testimony that
the total number of people tested for the
coronavirus by the CDC was 1,784. That means
that, as of Wednesday morning, the CDC had
tested only 77 people for the coronavirus
since Sunday. According to a CDC spokesman,
the number that had been tested as of Sunday
was 1,707.
Speaking at a different hearing on Wednesday, CDC
Director Robert Redfield, MD, said public health
labs — that is, labs run by individual states — were
ready to “test up to 75,000 people,” presumably
because they had received test kits from the CDC.
Redfield also said on Wednesday morning that 75
public labs were ready to perform tests across the
United States. In fact, the number is even higher —
81, according to Michelle Forman, a spokesperson for
the Association of Public Health Laboratories. Those
labs each have the capacity to perform 100 tests per
day.
So far, however, only 7,617 people have been
tested in state laboratories,
according to the COVID Tracking Project, a
database that updates the test statistics from
states and the federal government. (Some of those
statistics don’t include negative tests, which means
the number tested could be higher.) On Tuesday, the
50 states cumulatively had tested only 2,728 people,
meaning an average of 55 people tested per state.
Administration officials have repeatedly said
that private industry would step in and meet the
deficit. But it was because of an administration
directive that private laboratories could not
prepare for a coronavirus surge until earlier this
month. “We just haven’t been getting information
about how to get those kits,” Mark Birenbaum of the
National Independent Laboratory Association
told Yahoo News last week.
As a result, Birenbaum said in a subsequent
conversation, only a single private lab in the
United States is performing coronavirus tests. He
said he was aware of “one that will begin testing on
March 16, and seven to 10 that are still setting
up.” He later added that the total number of labs
preparing to test for the coronavirus was actually
15.
More testing will inevitably reveal more
coronavirus cases. The United States now has 1,300
cases, with 38 deaths. Trump admitted last Friday
that he was hesitant to have coronavirus-infected
passengers disembark the Grand Princess cruise ship
on U.S. shores because, as he explained, “I like the
numbers being where they are.”
The numbers where they are as of today are not
especially troubling, but likely not because the
coronavirus has failed to take hold. “Low case
counts so far may reflect not an absence of the
pathogen but a woeful lack of testing,” explained
former Department of Homeland Security official
Juliette Kayyem in
an article for the Atlantic.
That could lull Americans into a false sense of
security about the severity of the disease, and the
disruptions that the disease could cause. “If
Americans conclude that life will continue mostly as
normal,” Kayyem writes, “they may be wrong.”
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