How California Failed at Mass Coronavirus Testing

to keep up. There was problems with current infrastructure, supply shortages, and it led to difficulties in contact tracing too. Emily bomb Gardner, reporter for The l A Times, joins us for California's failure at mass testing. Thanks for joining us, Emily, Thank you glad to be here. As we continue to progress our way through the coronavirus pandemic, states have reopened, cases are surging. It seems like we're taking a step

back in a lot of ways. California is one of those state that is seeing a huge surge in cases. You know, Florida, Arizona, Texas, those are all other ones, but California is largely closing again amid the spike in coronavirus cases. The governor, Gavin Newsom has announced new statewide restrictions. Basically, indoor operations need to close. This is indoor dining and bars, family entertainment, zoos and museums. Also, gym's are gonna have

to close again, churches, hair salon's, malls, other businesses. I mean, it is a complete step back on this. And this is just one month after we reopened everything on June twelve, So it's really tough there. And there's so many things in this people going out and whatnot. But one thing that we always come back to is testing and how difficult testing has been. We've seen longer lines for testing, longer waits for results again. But Emily, you wrote an

article about how California failed the mass coronavirus testing. There was an early lag. We were playing from behind and we were never able to really catch up. Tell us a little bit about that, Emily. So what are looking at today was born from many mistakes leading up to this moment. I think it's pretty easy to look back over the past month and attribute what we're seeing right now to the reopenings. But in reality, the issues stem from much further back in the early stages of this.

For example, it was federal restrictions that really limited California's ability to get a handle on this. It was federal restrictions on who could be tested the really narrow criteria back in January and February, and that trickled over the last several months through several sort of cascading steps that led for this to get out of control. And I just want to put into context for people the reason that testing is so important. It's not just an individual

test result that tells you whether you should isolate. The reason it's so important for containing the outbreak is for contact tracing, something you've probably heard lots about, but right now, if the testing does not scale up, it's simply impossible to identify which people are continuing to spread the virus. So testing is really the central cornerstone for solving a

iceis like this. You know there's a lot of people that question, oh, well, it only has figures that point in time, and that's true, but as you mentioned, you have to nail it right when it's happening, so you can do that contact tracing tell the proper people to start isolating and hopefully limit a big spread. You actually started your story off with a brief example of what happened.

The Times identified a third flight that was coming into l a X, where public health officials really didn't say anything. They didn't alert travelers that they were at risk for infection. This was, you know, in the early stages of all this, and you tell about the husband of the family returned from China. The family started getting sick, but they didn't

get tested. They moved down into their community. Then people at their school, their kids school, got sick, and it became this cluster right there, and they couldn't do it because the family couldn't get tested. This is a family who even now will tell you they don't know whether coronavirus is what they were infected with. This was in the early stages when the respiratory symptoms were not distinguishable

from the flu, and they don't know. But they tried harder than most families I can imagine, trying to get a test, to be responsible and to stay away from the community. In fact, they were self isolating by choice in their home before this was ever something that officials

asked them to do. So just as to show you that members of the public were eager to prevent this from spreading and to participate in whatever way they could, But it was a lack of direction and the last coordination from the top, both at the federal level and also at the state level, that allowed this to sort of spiral to a point where people lost the ability to sort of take autonomy over over decisions and keep

this virus from spreading. So as in the early stages of this, the virus was starting to spread, we really didn't get a handle on the true number of it. And then what happened with the labs because this is another critical pardon We heard a lot of this story in the past, but you actually lay out the chronology this so well. That's why I wanted to talk to you about this. The labs were facing shortages of supplies.

The demand was increasing. It's something that's happening right now as we speak again, So tell us how that was going. There's a couple of different infrastructures you want to take note of here. The first is public health laboratories. Those are the government funded laboratories across the country and across the state that are funded by the government. That's important

because those specific laboratories have been crippled for years. One fourth of all of California's public health laboratories have closed in the last two decades. So we're talking about laboratories who had zero money, very thin staff, totally unprepared for something such as a pandemic or really any type of biological emergency. They've been pleading for funding for a long time, but until a crisis occurs, it's hard to convince officials that this is something that they need to be preparing

for financially. That's one side of the story. Of course, as you know, right from the White House down, they did acquire lots of support and help from commercial laboratories such as QUEST and Lab Corps around early March, which many people hoped would be a major turning point, and in some ways it was because testing was expanded drastically, but the limitation that was placed on commercial companies was

just a physical one. There's only so much supply across the world, and many many countries were demanding the exact same things from the supply chain at the exact same time, so specific types of plastics, specific supply carrier fluids, three agents. I'm sure you heard lots about chemical re agents. So the whole world is demanding something that there's a physically limited amount of, and so no money can really buy a solution to that problem. We were hearing about supply

shortages all across the board. Testing obviously was one personal protective equipment. Everybody was requiring the same materials, and you know it was just creating that increased shortage there. And you just continue a little bit more on the expanded testing you mentioned in here. States such as New York expanded a lot of testing the screen every nursing home patient and California didn't have that means, and we know that about half of the deaths in California are from

those facilities. So that's another unfortunate effect of this, but also why it's so important. If we were able to identify and isolate those people, then maybe so many deaths wouldn't have occurred. This is where you see a fork in the road between places like New York City and places like California. New York City was able to do things like that to really overcome barriers in specific hotspots or clusters. They would put cluster busters, as they're called.

These investigators who zero in on specific super spreaders and try to really just create a ring around them to isolate the infections from spreading outside of it. That was not done effectively in California, and there's a whole variety of reasons for that. It would be very difficult and perhaps unfair to try to pin it on one specific reason. But the outcome of that is that California was unable to focus in on testing specifically in these facilities where

the vast majority of deaths were occurring. And that was the project that they agreed to do. Even l a county specifically agreed to test every staff member and every resident in these guild nursing facilities, and even as of early June, they had not completed that project. So lots of sluggishness marking the California process. Sluggishness is a great word. Here. The backlog. Now, this is the next part of it. And one of the people who spoke to I laughed

because it's such a funny memory. But in this case it's not so funny obviously. But they said that this deluge of specimens, this backlog resembled that accelerating conveyor belt of confections on the classic chocolate factory episode of I Love Lucy. Just everything backing up and not being able to catch up. That's kind of what happened after that.

That's what lab workers and lab officials describe it as looking like the one that that's the specific woman that you're speaking about is a very high ranking lab representative for a hospital system, and she piled those samples into her own car and drove it to another laboratory to try to get them tested. So this is sort of a prime example of the way that the bureaucracy sort of broke down the system that was planned c that was already two things that had failed her to the

point where she had to drive the samples herself. Personally, I mean, good for her for wanting to get those things done, but man, that is that is really tough there. So this leads us all back to contact tracing and why that's so important. Everything's backed up, we're not identifying fresh cases, the new cases that are critical because those people maybe don't know they're still owed in the community

infecting others. And contact tracing. I mean, right now we have one thousand, seven hundred contact tracers for more than ten million residents. That's nowhere near enough. I mean, if you were to compare this to what we saw in the beginning when you had dozens of contact tracers, to a case that would never be replicated right now, certainly, but you do hope that your staff is strong enough and broad enough that you're able to very quickly react to cases. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to

mention it again now. The speed of testing impacts contact tracers greatly, because even Curative Curative is an example of a very strong, popular company, the tech startup from San Francisco that did a great great deal of testing in l A County. L A County abandoned using that company, and one of the reasons that I was told by a spokesperson for the county was the lag and test results.

And you know, if you if you have a lag such as forty eight hours, you've lost the window in which you can go identify the cases contact before they continue to spread. So we're talking about a very quick turner on that you need in test results in order to adequately carry out your contact tracing with your strong and large staff and enforcement. We know is another hurdle there. So I want to get to where we are now we're still lagging behind testing. We've seen the stories of

longer lines, longer wait times. Obviously after the holidays things kind of started blowing up, but once again we have the shortages of swabs, the reagents, the materials we need, and then also they're starting to scale back certain testing and certain areas again and imposing stricter guidelines for that. Some of that is the communication failure. Some of the

test sites you're referring to are the underutilized sites. So in some areas of the state, specifically rural areas and underserved inter city areas, we're a major focus for Governor Nuisance's plan for rolling out testing, for expanding testing to communities where the virus wasn't being detected very quickly in the early days, and you know, of course that kind

of work relies on good public communication. In some of those regions, there was questions over whether getting tested would be an issue regarding your immigration status, questions regarding whether it would be costly if you didn't have insurance, and of course coronavirus testing is free across the state, and officials do claim that regardless of your immigration status, they

want you to get tested. That there won't be any negative consequences for you for doing so, but that's not being communicated well enough to the public, at least that's what the numbers suggests. Because of these locations, testing is still low, the demand is low, and so the state has decided to go ahead and roll back those locations and use the funding and the support elsewhere. California is

just one state. This is the story that we're telling here, but this is kind of a problem that's been dogging other states as well, probably different circumstances, but still the overall importance of testing is so high and not everybody has been able to get it right. So I mean, it's something that really needs to be looked closer at. And obviously the same thing testing and contact tracing needs

to be improved across the board. Emily bomb Gardner, medical reporter at the l A Times, thank you very much for joining us. Seeing you very much, him Oscar Ramirez, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget after today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday from Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.