One of the top U.S. health officials working on the White House task force to combat the coronavirus said positive cases are increasing, which signals that care providers are “doing their job.”
Dr. Deborah Birx warned during a Thursday press conference that 90% of the illness is still “out there” but commended healthcare workers and manufacturers for ramping up testing throughout the country.
“The number of test positives is increasing, that is a dramatically important signature that everybody is doing their job,” said Birx. “Our test positive rates are now in the 10%-11% range. That still means 90% of the illness is out there.”
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Birx said that while anecdotes about people waiting up to five days to get results back are true, she expects the waiting period to decrease as testing kits are produced and transported to medical professionals.
“You can see the dramatic increases in the number of new cases based on our ability to test additional people,” she said. “This will continue over the next two to three days as we begin to have backlogs reduced of the testing.”
Birx stressed that over 50% of the cases in the United States have come from just 10 out of 3,000 counties nationwide and thanked healthcare workers for readying their staff and spaces for the inevitable increase in COVID-19 cases.
The coronavirus has infected more than 200,000 people worldwide with more than 80,000 already recovered, according to a health tracker produced by Johns Hopkins University.
