Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one hundred since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story in the US. We still don't have as many COVID tests as we need, and when people can get their hands on tests, they're not always reliable. But first, here's what happened in virus news today. The UK added London to its watch list of potential pandemic hotspots as coronavirus
cases surge across the country. The move is fueling fears that the capital, which recorded six hundred and twenty new COVID nineteen cases on Thursday, could face the kind of local lockdown measures imposed on other cities. The no new restrictions will be put on London immediately. Its designation as an area of concern means extra testing will be made available,
according to London Councils. In China, annual vaccine capacity is expected to reach six hundred and ten million doses by year end and one billion doses by the end of that's according to Jiang jongwe, an official at the National Health Commission. At a briefing in Beijing. Jang said prices will be affordable for the public, but did not give specifics.
No serious cases of adverse reaction were reported yet in an emergency use program of China's innoculations, And finally, in the next few days, the world will officially record one million deaths from COVID nineteen, but the real tally might be almost double that. Actual fatalities from the worst pandemic in a century may be closer to one point eight million. The death toll could grow to as high as three
million by the end of the year. Both projections are according to Alan Lopez, a laureate professor and director of the University of Melbourne's Global Burden of Disease Group. The coronavirus is rapid spread and transmission by people without symptoms mean that it has moved faster than our ability to do widespread testing. And now for today's main story, six months into the coronavirus pandemic, the US is still hamstrung
by testing efforts. There simply aren't enough COVID nineteen tests, and even when there are tests available, they aren't always reliable. Here's you order, Kristin V. Brown on the free for roll that US coronavirus testing has become last month when nineteen people at a nursing home and Needham, Massachusetts, suddenly tested positive for COVID nineteen. It sent the facility into a tailspin. But North Hill Communities hadn't had any positive
tests for weeks. That's North Hill CEO Ted Owens. He was especially worried because in the US, more than a third of deaths from the novel coronavirus have been connected to nursing homes. Massachusetts long term care facilities were especially hard hit emotionally. You get to the point where in the beginning, as people were dying, it was very stressful for the staff, and then things calmed down, things tapered down.
He kind of got used to it, you know, you reached some sort of new normal, not completely, but you kind of adjusted to where things were. And then suddenly you go probably three weeks with no positives, and then suddenly you have nineteen positives that came out of the blue. At the height of the pandemic, dozens of staff members and residents had contracted the virus and nine residents had died, but they had figured things out and put infection control
measures in place. Ted said that those positive results had instilled fear throughout the nursing home that a second wave of infection had come to the facility. But it turned out there wasn't a new wave of virus sweeping through the nursing home. The problem was the test. North Hill was one of about sixty nursing homes in Massachusetts that contracted with the Boston company called Origin. Origin is better known as a consumer DNA testing company, and not a
very serious one. One of its tests actually hunts for superhero genes. But Ted didn't know any of this when he started using the company. In late June, the state ordered all nursing homes to do regular surveillance testing and gave them less than three weeks to set up a testing program. Ted doesn't know how he heard about Origin. He just knows it was a scramble to find any company that could complete the amount of testing he needed every week. At one point, the state did recommend Origin
to nursing homes. My analogy is it was like, Okay, we're telling you that from now on you have to fly. Well, how do I fly? That's up to you. You figure that out. I'm just telling you what you need to do. And that's kind of what they did with the surveillance testing. They said, you need to do the surveillance testing, and it's up to you to figure out how to get
it done. A few weeks into surveillance testing, when all of those positive results came back, ted thought it seemed odd, and he told the state Health Department that, but he still had to treat the results seriously. He sent the eighteen staff members who tested a positive home and asked other staff to work over time. He isolated the one resident who had tested positive, and he sent out a letter to all the family members of residents telling them
what had happened. And, as you would expect, it through everyone into a panic. We were in scramble mode. So the first thing we did was we we started to do a complete audit of all our infection control procedures to try and figure out Initially, we just dissowned that somewhere there was a source of infection and we had missed it. It turned out that North Hill wasn't the only nursing home in Massachusetts going through this fire drill.
The state investigation found that the company returned almost four hundred false positive results. At least eleven nursing homes were impacted. False positives are almost always the result of a laboratory error. They usually mean that somehow a sample was contaminated. This happened sometimes, but labs are supposed to have checked someplace to catch those errors. The state said the Origin didn't
for ted. That meant spending tens of thousands of dollars in overtime and sick time and trying to figure out where the virus had come from. It also meant really scaring people for no reason. I think about the fear that this instills in these nine year old people who
are scared to begin with about this whole thing. And you know, we spend months trying to get them to calm down, to convince them that we're doing everything we can to keep them safe, that we're following all the protocols that are sent to us by c d C, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Now, this wasn't the
first time that Origin had run into lab issues. Last year, I reported a story in which former employees said that the company had generally troubling lab practices, including tampering with results. At the time, the company said that the former employees were disgruntled and called their accounts grossly inaccurate. A few years ago, Origin also grabbed headlines for not distinguishing a difference between DNA from a dog and DNA from a person. Origin is not even close to the only company that
has had issues with its tests. Here is Davy Smith, the head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. At the beginning of the epidemic, the CDC realized that there was going to be quality control issues, right, so they said only we could test, and that allowed them to have as much control over the quality because they knew exactly this is the one test that was done, this is how it was going to be diagnosed, and they
would have all the data. So that's a very good top down quality control process. The problem was there was no way the CDC could do all the tests that were necessary, um that was needed in a pandemic. So the second thing they did was, Okay, you know what, everybody has machines in all these labs all across the country, and you can do your own tests, so we can democratize testing. So go out there and go forth and test. Amidst a massive shortage of tests, the fd a basically
opened the floodgates. Making a basic COVID nineteen test in theory isn't all that difficult. A lot of labs have the equipment to do it. An Origin isn't even the weirdest company to pivot to COVID nineteen testing. There at least two companies that were previously best known for treating
erectile's function that also now offer coronavirus tests. Origin did receive what's known as an emergency Youth authorization for its test, but the review process for that is just not all that rigorous, and as of last month, labs that develop their own tests like Origin won't even have to jump through that hoop. At the moment, it's a little bit of the wild West, because the demand is so great and the supply it is so small that anybody out
there can make a test. You may recall other headlines about false results in recent months, including seventy seven false positives that sent the NFL spinning. The US needs more tests, but those tests just aren't all that valuable if they're not reliable, Davy said. We need better standards for internal quality control at labs, as well as a system that periodically checks to make sure labs are doing things properly
rather than just responding once an issue comes up. There are always going to be contamination issues, and they're always going to be technical issues and personnel errors, and we're humans, etcetera. The trick is to be able to catch it early and to be able to have rigorous quality assurance practices that are both internal. So if I run a lab, I want to make sure that my what I give my results out are reproducible and correct, and I want to be able to have an external agency that checks
all my homework. Davy said the free market is supposed to produce the best, most reliable products, but he said that is not what has happened during the pandemic. One of the things that I learned early on in this pandemic is that there wasn't if you had a task, there wasn't any competition you had. The demand for your test was so high that there was no Everybody was after you, and it didn't matter how good your quality was. The state of Massachusetts required Origin to submit a plan
to fix its internal quality issues. The company is now waiting for a green light to resume testing in the state in a statement to Bloomberg Origins said that it is confident that it will resume operations soon and provide accurate, timely test results. The company said it has made a plan to address its shortcomings in the lab, including hiring outside consultants to review its processes and hiring a new vice president of operations and a director of quality assurance.
The company said that is conducted more than forty thou tests, including for schools and nursing homes. It continues to sell its tests in other states. That was Kristin V. Brown and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com, slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to
help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topher foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Kristin V. Brown. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesco Levi and Rick Shawn Francesco Levie is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, MHM.