As coronavirus cases surge in much of the country, issues with testing availability and access have once again arisen in nearly every aspect of the testing supply chain, local officials and hospital leaders in several states told ABC News -- a troubling echo of the shortages that plagued the nation'
Testing issues have manifested differently in different parts of the country, from states in the midst of a renewed battle against COVID-19 and those who still fear one might be coming, officials said.
“Our lack of initial testing prevented early intervention,” added Brownstein, an ABC News contributor. “Our inability to ramp up testing prevented us from mitigating the impact on morbidity and mortality. And now our lack of test availability and timely diagnosis five months into the pandemic will directly contribute prolonging this first wave.”Nearly 65,000 new cases of the virus were reported across the country on Thursday, a new record, and while the U.S.
Spokespeople for HHS and FEMA said those supplies are then distributed to localities at the direction of the state. The FEMA spokesperson added the agency is committed to supporting states and urged them to coordinate closely with the federal government. Currently, the national positivity rate is a whopping 9%, according to an internal Federal Emergency Management Agency memo from Wednesday obtained by ABC News. South Carolina on Wednesday reported a test positivity rate of 20%, and Arizona's number has been around 30% in recent days. By contrast, New York, which suffered the worst of the outbreak early on, about 1% of tests currently come back positive.
"As more states begin to scale their testing capabilities, new constraints are materializing within the supply chain,” California’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, wrote in a statement, referring to the rising demand for testing across the country. “Simultaneously, laboratories are becoming overwhelmed with high numbers of specimens, slowing down processing timelines.
“And the worst-case scenario is having to limit testing to only individuals who are hospitalized because it makes an impact on PPE [personal protective equipment] utilization and potentially treatment with things like [the antiviral medication] remdesivir. We are not there yet and we hope to not get there," Billouix said.
Jo Lynn Garing, a spokesperson for a leading high-volume test manufacturing company Roche Diagnostics, said the company is aware the"demand for diagnostic tests and the instruments [to] conduct them has continued to outstrip supply since the beginning of the pandemic." New York had served as the deadly epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. early in the outbreak but then saw a drop in cases for weeks. But the downward trend has diminished in recent days, worrying local officials.
What the state has received, Brown wrote in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, is"not adequate and will slow down our plan to implement our universal long-term care testing program. Meanwhile, other states are receiving dramatically more testing transport media and swabs.”
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