CDC and Newsom are giving different numbers on coronavirus testing in California
Washington and Sacramento are providing different sets of numbers on the availability of coronavirus tests in California — and they don’t add up.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday it had sent California 69 testing kits for COVID-19, enough to test tens of thousands of people for the coronavirus.
But Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s health department said earlier on Thursday that kits had arrived to test only 8,227 residents.
A CDC official told McClatchy each kit contains 500 to 1,000 tests, so the number of residents that can be tested should be much higher than what Newsom said.
California public health officials could not account for the discrepancy. But it may be in the number of tests being used to take samples from each individual patient.
The tests are conducted using nose or throat swabs, which provide unique biological identifiers that can detect whether the coronavirus is present. Guidance for testing throughout February and the first days of March – when the outbreak began to gain steam – called for two patient samples per individual.
But CDC guidance published on March 9 told doctors that a single patient sample would be sufficient for an accurate result.
The CDC official said the initial kits sent to California included roughly 1,000 tests each. “Some of the more recent commercially developed test kits that have been sent out have 500,” the official said. “You have to validate each and every one of them.”
Some of those initial tests, shipped out before an updated version was adopted on February 28, included an ingredient that was producing some inconclusive results.
And adding to the confusion, Newsom said this week that many of the test kits lacked some chemical components needed to run the tests. Instructions provided to doctors from the Food and Drug Administration outline materials required for the tests that are not provided in the kits.
At a Thursday news conference at the California Capitol, he compared the kits to printers without ink and said it was “imperative” that the federal government send more product.
“I am surprised this is not more of the national conversation,” Newsom said. “We need to focus in on these tests.”
‘IT IS A FAILING.’
The CDC tests were shipped over the course of a month and at an increasingly rapid pace. But several members of the White House task force have acknowledged severe missteps in rolling out the tests, intended to surveil the spread of the virus at its earliest appearance while it is still possible to contain. Experts fear that point has passed in several large population areas, including New York City.
The Health and Human Services Agency has since put the head of the Public Health Service, Adm. Brett Giroir, in charge of organizing the dissemination of tests going forward. The FDA set up an emergency hotline on Friday for laboratories facing difficulty running tests. And task force officials siphoned $1.3 million in federal funds to private companies working on a test that can produce rapid results.
“It is a failing. Let’s admit it,” Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told lawmakers of the pace of national testing.
The coronavirus was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization this week.
State and local health officials have lamented the pace of test kit shipments amid the outbreak. Peter Beilenson, the public health officer in Sacramento County, said it was only able to test samples from 25 to 30 people per day.
A public health lab in Solano County, which serves that county as well as Yolo, Napa and Marin counties, only just got its test kit from the CDC — which will be good for analyzing the samples of about 800 people, said Solano County health officer Bela Matyas.
Nationwide, 1,323 Americans have tested positive for the virus and 38 have died from it since the crisis began.
California is among the worst-affected states, with 198 cases and four deaths as of Thursday morning. State health officials say they have tested more than 1,500 people.
Eighteen labs in the state are currently testing for the virus, according to the California Department of Public Health.
At the beginning of February, each test kit included roughly 700 to 800 individual tests, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters. In actuality, the CDC said that number accounts for a screening process that often weeds out a fraction of the tests.
Commercial labs coming online
President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force has identified California, Washington state and New York City as three regions where the disease has been established to be spreading from person to person, and said that testing in those regions would take priority.
“We’ve prioritized the shipment early on to those states that needed them the most,” Stephen Hahn, commissioner of food and drugs at the Food and Drug Administration, told reporters over the weekend.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said at the time that Washington and California has “everything it wants” in terms of diagnostics.
Only 75,000 of the CDC-produced tests were out in the field at public health labs by the end of the weekend. But 1 million commercial lab tests, using the CDC formula, were being validated for shipment.
Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the task force, said on Tuesday that those shipments had been made and to expect that number to reach 4 million by the end of the week.
Members of the task force have said that the president’s decision to turn quickly to commercial labs has been necessary to produce large volumes of tests at a rapid pace.
“When the president brought the commercial labs in, he did exactly the right thing because it’s those big companies that have logistics, infrastructure all over the country, have labs all over the country, that can distribute the tests, process the tests – whether it’s Quest or whether it’s LabCorp,” Pence told reporters on Tuesday.
Newsom said on Thursday that Quest already begun testing in California, and could soon begin testing up to 5,000 people a day in the state once it completes a planned expansion of its labs.
Health officials briefed members of Congress on Thursday and received a torrent of questions on the pace of testing. Several members emerged with a muddled picture of private and public sector efforts to put tests in the field that were coordinated at some points, and disjointed at others.
The delay in producing a test, Azar said over the weekend, was due to “a manufacturing scale-up issue when CDC tried to replicate the test by these other labs.”
“That’s the only issue that happened,” Azar said. “It was never that the test itself was faulty, defective, unavailable.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 6:11 AM with the headline "CDC and Newsom are giving different numbers on coronavirus testing in California."
