Coronavirus screening in the United States is declining even as infections remain high and the number of deaths rises to more than 1,000 per day, a disturbing trend that officials largely characterize americans’ discouragements of having to wait hours for a check and weeks to locate the results.
An analysis through The Associated Press found that the number of tests consistent with the day has fallen from 3.6% in the last two weeks to 750,000, and the number was reduced in 22 states. This includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Iowa where the constant percentage of positive tests is higher and continues to rise, an indicator that the virus is still spreading unchecked.
In the midst of the crisis, some fitness officials are calling for the advent of another type of verification that would produce effects in minutes and would be reasonable and sufficient enough for millions of Americans to review themselves, but also less accurate.
“There’s a sense of depression that we want to do anything else,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute.
Widespread testing is essential to engage the epidemic as the United States approaches a gigantic five million infections and more than 1 to 6,000 deaths of more than 700,000 worldwide.
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Demand for testing is expected to increase this fall, when schools reopen and flu season begins, the maximum is likely to exceed materials and lead to additional delays and bottlenecks.
Part of the drop in testing in the last expected weeks after expired advertising labs suggested that doctors focus on the maximum risk of their patients. But some fitness officials and government officials see the development of public frustration and declining demand.
In Iowa, state officials say they are less interested in checking, despite the abundant supply. The state’s check rate peaked in mid-July, but has declined to 40% in the last two weeks.
“We have the capacity. Iowans just wants to take the test,” Gov. Kim Reynolds said last week.
Jessica Moore, from rural Newberry, South Carolina, said that after a personal lab lost the effects of her COVID-19 in mid-July, she had to be a cane at a state contextual site.
Moore and her husband arrived early on a Saturday morning at the site, a network center, where they waited two hours for their trial. Moore looked through the rearview mirror as other people were driving, saw the long line of cars, then turned around and left.
“If other people have something to do on a Saturday and need to be tested, they might not wait two hours in the Heat of South Carolina for a test, especially if they’re not symptomatic,” Moore said.
Before traveling from Florida to Delaware last month, Laura DuBose Schumacher signed up to go to a drive-up testing site in Orlando with her husband. They were given a one-hour window in which to arrive.
They got there at the start of the window, but after 50 minutes it looked as if the wait would be another hour. Others who had gone through the line told them that they wouldn’t get their results until five days later, a Monday, at the earliest. They were planning to travel the next day, so they gave up.
“Monday would have been pointless, so we left the line,” Schumacher said.
The number of confirmed infections in the U.S. has topped 4.7 million, with new cases running at nearly 60,000 a day on average, down from more than 70,000 in the second half of July.
U.S. testing is built on highly sensitive molecular tests that detect the genetic code of the coronavirus. Although the test is considered the gold standard for accuracy, experts increasingly say the country’s overburdened lab system is incapable of keeping pace with the outbreak and producing results within two or three days, the time frame crucial to isolating patients and containing the virus.
“They’re doing as good a job as they possibly can do, but the current system will not allow them to keep up with the demand,” said Mara Aspinall of Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions.
Testing delays have led researchers at Harvard and elsewhere to propose a new approach using so-called antigen tests — rapid technology already used to screen for flu, strep throat and other common infections. Instead of detecting the virus itself, such tests look for viral proteins, or antigens, which are generally considered a less accurate measure of infection.
A number of companies are studying COVID-19 antigen tests in which you spit on a specially coated strip of paper, and if you are infected, it changes color. Experts say the speed and widespread availability of such tests would more than make up for their lower precision.
While no such tests for the coronavirus are on the U.S. market, experts say the technology is simple and the hurdles are more regulatory than technical. The Harvard researchers say production could quickly be scaled into the millions.
A proposal from the Harvard researchers calls for the federal government to distribute $1 saliva-based antigen tests to all Americans so that they can test themselves regularly, perhaps even daily.
Even with accuracy as low as 50%, researchers estimate the paper strip tests would uncover five times more COVID-19 cases than the current laboratory-based approach, which federal officials estimate catches just 1 in 10 infections.
But the approach faces resistance in Washington, where federal regulators have required at least 80% accuracy for new COVID-19 tests.
To date, the Food and Drug Administration has allowed only two COVID-19 antigen tests to enter the market. Those tests require a nasal swab supervised by a health professional and can only be run on specialized machines found at hospitals, doctor’s offices and clinics.
Also, because of the risk of false negatives, doctors may need to confirm a negative result with a genetic test when patients have possible symptoms of COVID-19.
On Tuesday, the governors of Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana and three other states announced an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to purchase more than 3 million of the FDA-cleared antigen tests, underscoring the growing interest in the technology.
When asked about introducing cheaper, paper-based tests, the government’s “testing czar,” Adm. Brett Giroir, warned that their accuracy could fall as low as 20% to 30%.
“I don’t think that would do a service to the American public of having something that is wrong seven out of 10 times,” Giroir said last week. “I think that could be catastrophic.”
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Associated Press writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Md., David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa, and Mike Schneider in Orlando, Fla., contributed to this report. Liu reported from Columbia, S.C., and Forster from New York.
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