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As the epidemic grows across the country, delays in showing the fundamental situations of public fitness demand still facing the country.
By Joseph Goldstein, Shawn Hubler and Katherine J. Wu
New Yorkers queued for hours by Friday for the coronavirus test, a disturbing indicator that the fundamental public condition demands situations that the United States still faces months after the first pandemic.
People were waiting for the tests they needed to paint or for school. some feared getting sick after mocking social distance while celebrating after the election; others hoped to stop in the circle of relatives safely on Thanksgiving, suggesting that the challenge may simply get worse over the next vacation. And some, deterred by the prospect of staying on the sidewalks for more than 3 hours in the rain, left undated.
“It’s so frustrating,” said Manhattan Councilman Mark Levine, chairman of the fitness committee. “We continue to delight in testing for new disorders. We solve either appearance. “
The lines and the developing call for testing underscore how a momentary wave of virus is threatening New York, coming as the entire country faces a record number of new cases – more than 181,000 nationwide on Friday. seriously new restrictions in a last-ditch effort to curb the epidemic.
The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington suggested that citizens avoid non-essential interstates in the coming days. In Utah, which has also just set a record, Gov. Gary Herbert issued a state-wide masking order this week and told citizens to restrict occasional social activities. meetings to those in their one-off homes.
In Illinois, which recorded more than 80,000 new cases last week, Gov. JB Pritzker warned that the state could soon impose a house care order.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will most likely have to shut down its school system, the largest in the country, with 1. 1 million children, as the positivity rate of seven-day trials in the five counties would soon be successful. 3 per cent.
In Washington, President Trump made his first appearance to talk about the epidemic since the election and said it was imaginable that vaccines opposed to the virus would be widely available in the spring.
Trump also deepened his enmity with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatening to withhold a cuomo state vaccine in the administration’s distribution plan.
The possible effect on the president’s risk was unclear without delay, as Trump will resign on January 20. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a close best friend of Cuomo’s and is likely to be to implement another distribution plan.
Obviously, even if things go well, there’s still months to go for vaccinations. For now, much of the focus is on control issues, which threatened to stop the effects and hinder efforts to spread the virus.
New York City had a record number of tests on Thursday, more than 74,000, authorities said. Across the country, nearly 1. 5 million people are tested every day, according to the Covid Tracking Project, almost twice as many as in August. and much more than in the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, when the ability to test is much lower.
Public fitness systems across the country once retested the need for testing. Some regions face an imminent shortage of laboratory capacity. Elsewhere, such as New York, clinics and other test sites have been overtaken by a large number of people. Tests.
“Spring is pale for what we’re experiencing right now,” said Karissa Culbreath, medical director and head of the infectious diseases department at TriCore Laboratories in New Mexico, where cases have soared in recent times.
In recent months, Americans must undergo millions of additional tests, however, demand is higher faster.
“We continue to conduct more tests on this pandemic without further strategy,” Dr. Culbreath said.
From March to October, Culbreath said, his team conducted a million more diagnostic tests than are typical for their facilities, a relentless attempt to keep up with the pandemic while searching for other infectious viruses and bacteria that continue to affect patients.
This week, the American Association of Clinical Laboratories, which represents Quest Diagnostics and the giant advertising labs that have borne much of the burden of virus testing, warned that effect processing times would also be longer.
The organization said its member laboratories conducted nearly a million virus tests on Wednesday and were experiencing a shortage of pipette tips and other tests.
“The labs have been to make it work,” said Dr. Patrick Godbey, president of the College of American Pathologists and director of two laboratories in Georgia. “Pathologists and laboratory scientists have made heroic efforts to answer the call. has not fallen and the numbers are emerging again. You see it now in Illinois, Wisconsin. “
In Washington state, Providence Health and Services, which operates a driving control near Olympia with Thurston County, had to reject cars when more than 200 people were covered on Monday, the fitness service provider said in a statement. s reported hours of waiting.
In the face of escalation of complaints, officials in the city and state of New York tried to minimize delays, saying that others could simply be tested if they searched.
Gareth Rhodes, a member of Cuomo’s coronavirus executing organization, defended state functionality and pointed to the number of sites across the state, around 1200.
More than 400 of those sites are located in New York. Some sites, Mr. Rhodes, were operating below their capacity.
For others who fear long lines, Mr. Rhodes calls or makes an appointment. That way, he said, “other people don’t have to wait at all. “
Dr Andrew Wallach, Senior Test Program Officer
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“Most people come and go in about an hour,” Dr. Wallach said.
A lot of New Yorkers found it so easy.
New York City had promoted its progress for months for better testing, however, this week’s lines showed that public fitness design still suffers to deal with the epidemic.
Sample collection is the simplest component of the process, given the need for testing.
The government has relied heavily on existing emergency care clinics, such as the CityTM network, to do much of the pattern collection, but there are enough collection sites to stay awake.
CityTM spokeswoman Joy Lee-Calio, who has more than 130 clinics in the New York area, said the number of visits, the maximum of which were related to the virus, increased by 25% in recent weeks.
The long queues led CityTM to announce that its clinics would start 90 minutes before them to prevent it from being delayed at night.
“Our site and doctors have been treating patients far beyond the overall final time for months, and we’ve gotten to the point where they’re sacrificing their own protection and health,” the company wrote in an email to patients Friday about the closure. Change.
CityTM collects samples for about 15,000 day-consistent coronavirus tests at its sites, more than one of which is in all five counties, Lee-Calio said.
Government-run control sites in New York also had waiting times, but were a little shorter.
In a check under a giant white tent in front of a social housing complex in Harlem, the queue at noon didn’t increase much.
“In particular, I’ve avoided going to a CityTM because the queues don’t move there,” said Josh Fiene, 31, who after 20 minutes was at the head of an eight-person row.
She had no symptoms, but she had to be tested because her roommates were dating someone recently exposed to the virus.
But for many, the challenge is to get into a clinic.
At 10 a. m. m. , Avi Weinstein, 31, lined up in a gentle rain on West 88th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, heading to a CityMD emergency care center where he hoped to get tested. “I’ve been here an hour and a half, ” he said.
Weinstein said he had had a fever the night before and feared he would have felt inflamed as he celebrated the effects of last week’s election with friends.
“I expect a long tail, ” he said, “but not so much. “
The queue got longer in the morning, with some other people waiting about 3 hours to succeed at the clinic door.
“We need to see our grandchildren on Thanksgiving, and we hope that if they’re all negative, it can happen,” said Erica Eisinger, 76, who was waiting with her husband, Peter.
The scene is the same at CityMD clinics in New York: long queues and varying degrees of frustration and bewilderment as to why getting practical and timely viral control was a struggle so many months after the pandemic began.
In the Williamsburg segment of Brooklyn, Arjun Mocherla waited about an hour outdoors at a city clinic, most likely advancing 15 feet on a socially remote line. Mocherla, a law student at New York University, had been examined at university in the past.
“That’s my first line, ” he said. I’m already starting it. “
Then he told her that the wait could last only 4 hours. He’s gone.
Elisha Brown and Matthew Sedacca contributed to the report.
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