US lab bucks as virus testing surges

Matthew Peron, Tammy Webber, Matt Sedensky
AP communication

WASHINGTON-Institutes across the United States are buckling under a surge of coronavirus tests, causing long processing delays that experts say are actually below the pandemic response.

With a surge in the U.S. aggregate and new cases that infected 3.9 million people on Wednesday, the bottleneck was workers who couldn’t continue to work while waiting for results, nursing homes struggling to keep the virus out, and It is causing problems for the lab itself, which deals with overwhelming workloads.

Some laboratories have spent weeks returning COVID-19 results, exacerbating the fear that asymptomatic people may spread the virus if they are not quarantined while waiting. I will.

“There was a lot of attention to “how many tests a day do you have,”” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The problem is how many tests are being run that return results within a day. The individuals tested are immediately quarantined and the contacts are immediately alerted.”

Frieden and other public health professionals have called on the state to publicly report the duration of the test and called it an essential indicator for measuring progress against the virus.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the delay in testing in the United States was due to a staggering 15 million confirmed worldwide infections on Wednesday. The United States leads the world in incidents, with more than 142,000 deaths nationwide. Once the United States leader of infectious diseases, New York has been overtaken by California, partly due to strong testing in states more than twice the population of New York.

Guidelines issued by the CDC recommend setting a test turnaround time of less than 4 days for lifting virus restrictions. The agency recently published new recommendations to confirm recovery against reexamination of most COVID-19 patients.

“It’s clogging the system,” Assistant Health Secretary Admiral Brett Giroa told reporters last week.

Beyond the economic damage that delays in testing can cause, they also pose a major health risk.

In Florida, nursing homes have been ordered to test every employee every two weeks as the state confirmed 9,785 new cases Wednesday and the death toll increased to around 5,500. But the long delays in the results question the point.

J Solomon, CEO of Aviva in Sarasota, a senior community with nursing homes and nursing homes, said the results could take up to 10 days.

“It’s like, what have we done at that time?” Solomon said. “If the person is not quarantined within 7-10 days, are they unnoticed spreading?”

The test results that come back after a few days are of little value because the window for tracking a person’s contacts is essentially closed to prevent additional infections.

Dr Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said it made sense to tell someone waiting for the test results to quarantine for 24 hours, but the delay was unacceptable.

“Imagine. If you were telling a parent with a young child to be self-isolated for 10 days or more without knowing that they actually had a COVID, it would be ridiculous.

U.S. officials have recently demanded enhanced screening to include healthy-looking Americans who appear to unknowingly spread the disease in their communities. However, Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest test chains in the United States, says it can’t keep up with demand and most patients need to wait more than a week to get results.

Quest asks healthcare providers to reduce testing from low-priority individuals, such as those who have no symptoms or who do not have contact with people who test positive.

As testing expands, so do mask orders and other measures to control the infection. Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, and Oregon are the latest to announce mandatory statewide mask orders Wednesday.

The United States tests more than 700,000 people per day from less than 100,000 in March. Trump administration officials point out that about half of U.S. tests are done with a quick system that delivers results in about 15 minutes, or in hospitals, typically by processing tests in about 24 hours. doing. But last month, there were about 9 million tests left to go through the lab, which had been plagued by the limited chemistries, machines, and kits to develop the COVID-19 test.

In the US, there is no scientific consensus on the test rate needed to control a virus, but experts have recommended that the US test at least 1 to 3 million people per day for several months. I will.

Medical experts compiled by the Rockefeller Foundation said last week that the U.S. would test 30 million Americans a week by fall, when school restarts and the flu season are expected to exacerbate the spread of the virus. He said it should be expanded. The group has admitted that current laboratory-based test systems are not possible.

The National Institutes of Health organized a “shark aquarium” contest to quickly identify promising rapid tests and received more than 600 applications. The goal is to have new test options in mass production by fall.

Until then, the backbone of testing in the United States remains in hundreds of labs, with large-capacity machines capable of handling thousands of samples per day. Many say that without the global shortage of testing chemicals, pipettes and other materials, we can handle much more.

Dr. Bobipritt of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota says hospital machinery is running at just 20% capacity. Lab technicians run seven different COVID-19 test formats, switching depending on availability of supplies.

At Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, lab workers work weekly with test makers to provide kits, chemicals, and other materials.

“We have no plans for the future. We’re doing as much as we can to get more done,” says Colleen Kraft, who leads the hospital’s laboratory.