The Trump administration was slow to roll out coronavirus diagnostic tests, a delay critics say put the public at greater risk and demonstrated that the president is not prepared to handle the disease outbreak.
President Trump has been criticized for downplaying the severity of the outbreak in the United States and for delays in getting diagnostic tests to doctors who need them for their patients. He’s dismissed such criticisms, saying Friday that “anybody that needs a test gets a test,” yet the reality is that the U.S. failed to make the tests easily accessible early on, even with weeks to prepare.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tested only 1,583 Americans for coronavirus so far. In contrast, Chinese manufacturers are able to develop about 1,650,000 tests per week. China, Italy, and the United Kingdom are testing tens of thousands of people for the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.
The tests have been slow to roll out to the public in part because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to stop sending out the first batch of tests because they gave inaccurate results. States were only permitted to use tests created by the CDC, so they had to wait for the agency to create more accurate tests. Then, after conducting the tests, state labs had to send results to CDC labs to get confirmation that the results were accurate.
Despite having the technology to create their own diagnostic tests that would take less time to complete, state labs had to request diagnostic tests from the CDC and wait for them to arrive, further delaying the screening process.
The Food and Drug Administration changed course Feb. 29 and gave permission to state and commercial labs to work on their own diagnostic tests.
Members of the White House coronavirus task force then announced March 3 that labs still relying on CDC tests no longer needed to send results of diagnostic tests to CDC labs for final review in an effort to eliminate lengthy exchanges between states and the federal agency.
Still, not enough hospitals have screening tests to properly diagnose patients who are exhibiting coronavirus symptoms or are at high risk of carrying the virus. For instance, about 9,000 Californians recently returned from countries seeing huge spikes in cases and need to be tested for the virus, but the hospitals can’t get the necessary diagnostic tests, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Without making test kits available to all doctors that request them, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it will be hard to measure the scope of the outbreak in the U.S.
“You know, I think we’re getting a better sense [of the scope] as the day goes by,” Fauci said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Unfortunately that better sense … is not encouraging because we’re seeing community spread. And whenever you see community spread, you can do contact tracing. But as more communities spread, it becomes logistically more difficult to do that.”
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn announced Friday that “millions” of tests will be shipped out by the end of the week. Vice President Mike Pence, whose new job is to assure Americans that the government is fully prepared to deal with a possible pandemic, said that same day that the White House coronavirus task force expects “that at the end of next week, four million tests will be shipped” to states.
Already, Pence said, the CDC has been able to send tests to every state and jurisdiction that requested one, and between March 2 and last Thursday, “we distributed more than 900,000 tests across the country, including 200,000 that could allow 75 individual patients — 75,000 individual patients to be tested.”
Once more state health officials were able to get CDC diagnostic tests, they found that more people had been infected than previously thought.
For instance, an Oregon resident who had been exhibiting symptoms of the coronavirus since Feb. 19 was tested when the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory received a CDC test on Feb. 26. The patient was diagnosed with coronavirus on Feb. 28.
Just one day later, once Washington State Public Health Laboratories were permitted to perform tests without having to first send results to CDC labs, the state’s public health department confirmed the first death due to coronavirus in the U.S.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said on Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS that the government has made progress in making tests more widely available, but agencies still have work to do.
“I think they are moving in that direction,” Inslee said. “And we need the federal government to help really vitalize and mobilize our manufacturing capacity to do protective equipment, and we need to do what we did in World War II to mobilize that supply chain.”
Confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases have surpassed 500, with cases reported in 34 states and the District of Columbia.
