As Coronavirus Cases Surge, Testing Shortfalls Are Leading to Long Lines Again

complicate everything. M a court healthcare reporter at Bloomberg News joins us for how testing is hitting a snag again. Thanks for joining us, Emma. Thanks. It seems that we are back at it again some of the same bad news we were hearing at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. We're starting to see cases rise across the country and that's making people want to go get tested even more.

But as I mentioned once again, the whole country is grappling with a shortfall of testing and we can't seem to get over it, even though we are testing much much more this time around. Emma, tell us a little bit about it. The challenge here is, you know, in the early days of the pandemic, right there was a shortfall of testing, people couldn't get tested, and that proved to be an impediment for other efforts to contain the viruses spread things like contact tracing other public health work.

We're finding ourselves in a somewhat similar situation today, even though testing capacity has expanded significantly from that early kind of period. I think the best way to explain it really kind of comes down to those two core ideas of supply and demands. So testing supplies both swabs that take you know, test sample to the sort of materials that preserve it while it's transported to the lad to

the equipment that runs the test itself. Processes that test these different parts of the supply chain have all come under strain, you know, over the last couple of months, and even though these aspects have been alleviated of our time,

they haven't been in high rely solved. Now, whether it's even possible to solve it as a whole another question, right, But even as you have these persistent problems around supply and being able to supply test to the American public, you also have demand getting really ratcheted up with the reopenings. Now you have nursing homes trying to test all of their employees. You have employers saying that they want to

maybe provide testing to their employees as well. You have people who haven't even necessarily come into contact with someone who has been infection wanting to get tested just to be sure, right before they gather with members of their family, for instance, or in social settings and things like that.

So all of these things taken together, got it out of the problem, and we're starting to see that problem coming out in these hot spot states that have begun to emerge, like Texas, you know, like Arizona, working long lines outside of urgent care centers. For instance, hospital I spoke to in Houston said their lab had gotten a double amount of testing volume in the prior sort of

weak plus. So these are problems that are beginning to bubble up in these new focuses of the pandemics, these parts of the country that are a new focus of the pandemic. And unfortunately, I think with the trajectory being what it is, you know, it sounds like these problems are going to continue over time. You mentioned Texas specifically,

they have pretty robust setups for testing. I think they converted a few high school football stadiums or something like that, so that people can roll through and get tested, and even then, you know, by midday, mid morning or whatever, they've reached their capacity and they have to turn people away. So what's it's translating to is really long wait times to actually get tested and then longer wait times to

get those results back as well. And we're seeing the cases surge throughout the United States and a bunch of states are having to roll back the reopening procedures because

of all these surgeon cases. What's important to note here is like in Texas in particular, we did some reporting in that state, and you know, it wasn't just getting into get the test, which in many places you have to in text if you basically have to get an appointment to get tested, So you might wait a week or something like that just to go get tested, and then at that point we're likely to see waits for test results increase to you know, one of the big

trade groups that represents the big commercial abs here in the US said basically, they're forecasting a real big surge in demand in the coming weeks and they're expecting that that made the lay test results. Importantly, when you wait a long time for test results. I mean a week is an extreme scenario, but even having to wait a couple of days, that's an amount of time that maybe if you're thinking, oh, I probably don't have COVID nineteen, I can go about my life, I can go to work,

things like that. You know, that adds risk into the equation basically, and so the longer you wait for test results, the more likely this risk is going to compound. President Trump has said a lot that we've built the biggest testing system you know of everybody. The US process about five fifty seven thousand tests each day on average over the last week. But then the current outbreak, they say that we need millions, two to four million tests a day to really kind of track all of this stuff.

The burden is all on the states. They get limited supplies and they have to allocate all that. So it's kind of a whole ripple effect because it's tough to keep that in track. And then beyond that, when it comes to contact tracing, all these delays make it much much harder to do all that contact tracing. As you were just mentioning, people go about their business not getting a test, and they can be infecting people and not

really know it. What's important to note is we already have evidence in parts of the country that the virus is spreading in a sustained way in the community. And so this is a point where contact tracing systems, if they're not already you know, established and robust, can easily get overwhelmed. Um when you have really large numbers in cases.

For instance, I spoke with an official with UT system and because who said, basically, you know, you have six and four hundred new cases one day, and you keep getting those kinds of members each day. You know, a local health department just can't keep up right, They're gonna get overwhelmed. And so I mean, ideally you wouldn't want

to get to this point. But when you have like delays and test results, or you have for instance, aging infrastructure where test results are getting reported by FATS, that flows down the process, and that's kind of where we are in the US. I mean, I don't think it can be under emphasized at this point that we have not invested in the kinds of infrastructure we need to get this infection under control. But it's not too late. You know, a lot of public health experts say we

can still take these kinds of steps. We can still invest in public health infrastructure. We can still make more robust systems for testing. We can test smarter. That's when a lot of people have also said, maybe the focus shouldn't be on testing everyone. Maybe we should focus on the places where there's most likely to be transmission and

also be smarter about how we reopen. What are the places in which the virus is most likely to sort of run in the community that increasingly seems to be bars, right. We've heard that become a big talking point coming out of states where these hot spots of emerged. You know, Texas closed the bars late last week. We've heard Florida

moved towards taking similar steps as well. So I think there are some questions about if our infrastructure isn't up to snow, are there ways we can tell our approach in a better manner and a court healthcare reporter at Bloomberg News, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this is reopening America. Don't forget effort. Today's big news stories. You can check me out on

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