A top doctor assisting the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic said there will be a large spike in confirmed coronavirus cases in the next few days as testing becomes more readily available.
Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, discussed “the curve” during Wednesday’s briefing, referring to the number of confirmed cases as they would appear on a graph.
She also warned against panicking about the dramatic increase, noting the curve will stabilize after an initial influx of cases resulting from the increased testing rates.
“We’ve now moved into platforms that can run basically tens of thousands of tests per day,” Birx said. “There were individuals who had been tested, who hadn’t had their specimen run because of the slow throughput. It’s now in a high-speed platform. So, we will see the number of people diagnosed dramatically increase over the next four to five days.
“I know some of you will use that to raise an alarm that we are worse than Italy because of our slope of our curve,” the doctor added, referring to the reporters in the room. “To every American out there: It will be five to six days’ worth of tests being run in 24 to 48 hours, so our curves will not be stable until sometime next week.”
Earlier in the White House briefing, President Trump said researchers are looking into the effectiveness of “self-swab” coronavirus tests that he said can be less invasive than the current testing methods.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday that neither Trump nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are to blame for the slow rollout of COVID-19 testing in the United States.
In the U.S., there have been 7,324 cases of the coronavirus, 17 recoveries, and 115 deaths, according to the latest reading by the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
