U.S. Will Miss Coronavirus Test Rollout Goal, Senators Say

(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration won’t be able to meet its promised timeline of having a million coronavirus tests available by the end of the week, senators said after a briefing from health officials.

“There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week,” Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said in Washington Thursday. “It’s way smaller than that. And still, at this point, it’s still through public-health departments.”

Scott and other lawmakers said the government is “in the process” of sending test kits out and people still need to be trained on how to use them. The entire process could take days or weeks, they said.

“By the end of the week they’re getting them out to the mail,” Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said. “It’s going to take time to be able to get them, receive them, re-verify them and then be able to put them into use.”

The lack of testing kits for hospitals and health departments has created a gaping vulnerability in the U.S. effort to contain the virus. Success depends on local health departments being able to identify patients, isolate them, and stop them from infecting others. Instead, local health authorities have been finding some new patients only when they become more seriously ill, and then discovering clusters of infection around them without knowing where the web of transmission originated.

Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked Wednesday at a hearing in Congress whether the U.S. should be proactively testing people in hospitals and other settings.

“The answer is yes and I feel strongly about that,” Fauci said.

Test Flaws

An initial test developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed, leading to weeks of delays for frustrated doctors and local public health officials who couldn’t check suspected cases. The U.S. has since made changes to the test and taken steps to expand availability.

But the rollout of the new tests has been accompanied by confusing messages from the administration about how many will be available, and when.

Earlier this week, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn told senators at a hearing that the U.S. would have the “capacity” to perform up to 1 million tests by the end of this week, a timetable reinforced by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar at a White House briefing Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence said that 1.5 million tests would be going out.

On Thursday, Azar clarified some aspects of those figures. Speaking in Washington, he said that by the end of this week the CDC will have shipped enough tests to public health labs for 75,000 people to be tested. The manufacturer that works with CDC on testing, Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc., believes it will have sent out enough test kits for a million specimens by the end of this week, Azar said, which will be sufficient to test 400,000 people.

Those test kits are being sent out to hospitals, labs and other health facilities, Azar said, broadening the ability to check for the virus beyond public health departments. There should be tests for more than 4 million specimens shipped by next week, an amount “far far ahead of similarly impacted major countries around the world,” Azar said.

President Donald Trump has emphasized that the U.S. has few cases. On Twitter Thursday, he lauded a decision to limit travel from countries with ongoing outbreaks.

But disease experts inside and outside the federal government have said the official CDC count of 129 cases is likely far too low, in part because of the diagnostic backlog.

Private companies are also racing to bring more coronavirus tests to market, with the help of a new FDA policy giving them leeway to quickly develop the screens and roll them out.

Lab testing giant Quest Diagnostics Inc. said Thursday that it has developed its own diagnostic for the coronavirus. The Secaucus, New Jersey-based company expects to begin doing coronavirus testing on samples from hospitals and clinics on Monday.

Senate Briefing

The senators were briefed Thursday by Fauci, Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

“It’s going to take a couple of weeks,” Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland said. “Even though the kit arrives, they say by the end of the week, I don’t think they’ll be ready for tests by the end of the week.”

Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said senators were given a document with information about the coronavirus and how to avoid contracting it, but there were no details about how or where to be tested.

The Trump administration has come under criticism for the test-kit shortage, which local public health officials have said hampers their ability to survey the U.S. population for the virus.

“Our single greatest challenge is the lack of fast federal action to increase testing capacity -- without that, we cannot beat this epidemic back,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement Thursday as he announced two additional cases diagnosed in the city.

--With assistance from Stacie Sherman, Emma Court and Jeannie Baumann.

To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Flatley in Washington at dflatley1@bloomberg.net;John Tozzi in New York at jtozzi2@bloomberg.net;Shira Stein in Arlington at sstein51@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, ;Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Brendan Walsh

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