U.S. testing for the coronavirus is dropping even as infections remain high and the death toll rises by more than 1,000 a day, a worrisome trend that officials attribute largely to Americans getting discouraged over having to wait hours to get a test and days or weeks to find out the results.
An Associated Press analysis found that the number of tests per day slid 3.6% over the past two weeks, to 750,000, with the count falling in 22 states. That includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Iowa, where the percentage of positive tests is high and continuing to climb, an indicator that the virus is still spreading uncontrolled.
Tests have fallen by about 2% in Indiana over the past seven days until the following week, but have increased over a longer period. The state reported a 268,890 test cumulative in July, up from 223,820 in June. This is an accumulation of about 20%.
In the midst of the crisis, some fitness officials are calling for the advent of a type of control that produces effects in minutes and is reasonable and undeniable enough for millions of Americans to control themselves, but also less precise.
“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 7,000 deaths of more than 700,000 worldwide.
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.
Some of the decline in testing over the past few weeks was expected after backlogged commercial labs urged doctors to concentrate on their highest-risk patients. But some health and government officials are seeing growing public frustration and waning 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 spend a car check in Orlando with her husband. They had a time window to get there.
They arrived at the beginning of the window, but after 50 minutes it looked like the wait would be an extra hour. Others who crossed the line told them they would not get their effects until five days later, on a Monday at the earliest. They were making plans for the next day, so they gave up.
“Monday would have been useless, so we left the line, ” said Schumacher.
The number of infections shown in the United States exceeded 4.7 million, with new inconsistent instances with approximately 60,000 consistent with the day on average, to more than 70,000 at the time of July.
U.S. controls They are mainly based on very delicate molecular controls that stumble upon the genetic code of the coronavirus. Although control is seen as the benchmark for accuracy, experts increasingly say that the country’s overburdened lab formula cannot keep up with the epidemic and produce effects in two or 3 days, the time to isolate patients and engage the virus.
“They’re doing the most productive task possible, but the existing formula might not allow them to meet the demand,” said Mara Aspinall of Arizona State University’s School of Health Solutions.
Test delays have led researchers at Harvard and elsewhere to propose a new antigenic testing technique, an immediate generation already used to detect influenza, strep pharyngotics and other non-unusual infections. Instead of detecting the virus itself, these tests look for viral proteins or antigens, which are sometimes 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%, the researchers estimate that paper strip tests would reveal five times as many CASES of COVID-19 than the existing lab-based approach, which the federal government says detects one 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 two COVID-19 antigen tests to enter the market. These tests require a nasal pattern supervised by a fitness professional and can be performed on specialized machines found in hospitals, medical offices, and clinics.
In addition, due to the threat of false negatives, doctors may want to verify a negative result with a genetic control when patients have imaginable symptoms of COVID-19.
On Tuesday, governors of Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana, and 3 states announced an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to acquire more than 3 million FDA-approved antigen tests, underscoring growing interest in technology.
When asked about the advent of less expensive paper tests, the government’s “test czar,” Admiral Brett Giroir, warned that its accuracy could fall by 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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