With coughing and shortness of breath, Sam Lee, a resident of Austin, Texas, took 3 attempts to take a COVID-19 test. He is alone, as some Americans go at least a week without a diagnosis amid the new call for tests as instances of coronavirus accumulate in states such as Texas and Arizona.
The first time, Lee appeared an hour before he closed the public verification site and told him they had reached his capacity. He got rid of a polling place when the rain stopped him, and voluntarily left a third center after someone in front of him said they had been queuing for more than 3 hours.
Delays occurred when Texas again broke its one-day record for new instances of coronavirus this week, reporting 10,028 new instances on Tuesday when authorities warned that hospitals were gaining capacity. Test delays can ultimately make it even more difficult to spread the disease because, without knowing if they are positive, other people do not replace their behavior, the Republic of Arizona reported.
According to experts, Texas wants to increase its tests from approximately 50,000 tests a day lately to approximately 117,000 tests a day to keep the virus under control. But expanding the number of tests might not help unless the effects are returned in a timely manner, Dr. Mark Escott, interim director of fitness at Austin Public Health, told CBS News.
“There becomes a point where it doesn’t make sense to test more people if we can’t get results back in a timely fashion to do anything about those positive tests,” he said.
Lee, however, underwent testing on June 29 after arriving at a siege before dawn and waiting more than two hours. “If you have symptoms and just drive around the city to see how you can get tested, for PEOPLE with HIV, it’s not ideal,” he added.
Another five days passed before he was able to view the results online, and he didn’t receive a text with the results until seven days after being tested. In Arizona, one man waited 27 days for his test results, the Arizona Republic said.
Four months, 3 million confirmed infections and over 130,000 deaths into the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Americans confronted with a resurgence of the scourge are facing long lines at testing sites in the summer heat or are getting turned away. It can take a week or more to receive test results because of the increase in demand across the country, particularly in Southern and Western states.
On Monday, Quest Diagnostics said its turnaround time for tests is four to six days, compared with two to three days a month ago. Some sites are running out of kits, while labs are reporting shortages of materials and workers to process the swabs.
Some frustrated Americans are left to wonder why the U.S. can’t seem to get its act together, especially after it was given fair warning as the virus wreaked havoc in China and then Italy, Spain and New York.
“It’s a disaster,” said 47-year-old Jennifer Hudson in Tucson, Arizona. “The fact that we depend on business and don’t have a national reaction to that is ridiculous … This prevents others who want exams from passing the exams.”
It took Hudson five days to make an appointment at a CVS pharmacy near his home. She booked a check over the weekend, more than a week after her symptoms (fatigue, shortness of breath, headaches and sore throat). The clinic informed him that its effects would probably be delayed.
Testing has been ramped up nationwide, reaching about 640,000 tests per day on average, up from around 518,000 two weeks ago, according to an Associated Press analysis. Newly confirmed infections per day in the U.S. are running at over 50,000, breaking records at practically every turn.
More testing tends to lead to more cases found. But in an alarming indicator, the percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus is on the rise across nearly the entire country, hitting almost 27% in Arizona, 19% in Florida and 17% in South Carolina.
Although the United States has conducted more tests than any other country, it ranks in the middle of the group in terms of consistency with capital testing, Russia, Spain and Australia, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“I am stunned that as a nation, six months into this pandemic, we still can’t figure out how to deliver testing to the American people when they need it,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute. “It is an abject failure of leadership and shows that the federal government has not prioritized testing in a way that will allow us to get through this pandemic.”
Testing alone without adequate contact tracing and quarantine measures won’t control the spread of the scourge, according to health experts. But they say delays in testing can lead to more infections by leaving people in the dark as to whether they need to isolate themselves.
In other developments:
— While the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. hit 3 million Wednesday by Johns Hopkins’ count, health officials have said that because of inadequate testing and the many mild infections that have gone unreported, the real number is about 10 times higher, or almost 10% of the U.S. population.
— A crowd of thousands attending President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in late June, along with large groups of people who showed up to protest, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases in the area, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday. Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed cases on Monday, a new record one-day high, and another 206 confirmed cases on Tuesday. A spokesman for the Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
— Most New York City students will return to school in the fall two or three days a week and learn online the rest of the time under a plan announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio. He said schools can’t accommodate all their students at any one time and maintain social distancing. The school system in New York is the biggest in the nation, with 1.1 million students. It has been closed since March.
In New York, the deadliest hot spot in the country in the spring, testing was rare at first, but they are now widely available. According to the city’s fitness department, up to 35,000 tests are conducted through a mix of personal fitness agencies and municipal agencies.
“On a large scale it is the key to reopening our city safely,” de Blasio said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week said it will open free “surge testing” sites in three hard-hit cities: Jacksonville, Florida; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Edinburg, Texas. The sites will be able to conduct as many as 5,000 tests a day in each city, with results in three to five days, officials said.
In Georgia, one of the states where cases are surging, officials are rushing to expand testing capacity as demand threatens to overwhelm six major sites around Atlanta, said DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond.
“If you project this out over the next three weeks, we can’t handle it,” he said.
In New Orleans, people were turned away from a free testing site for a third consecutive day after it reached its daily allotment of tests. Health care providers are running low on trays and chemicals needed to run machines used in the tests.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego called the stage “desperate,” as citizens sat in sun-cooked cars for up to thirteen hours to pass driving checks. Robert Fenton, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA doubled the check materials it planned to send to Arizona.
Patrick Friday, a United Methodist minister in Alabama, went to several hospitals and clinics in Birmingham this week to get checked after his school-age son tested positive. But he was told that unless he had a preexisting condition, he didn’t qualify.
Finally, he ended up at a site offering rapid-result tests and his negative result came back quickly.
“We are several months into this,” he said. “How can it be that we can’t go in and get a test?”
Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes.
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