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Since the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, more than 5.4 million cases of coronavirus have been reported in the United States. However, this is only what has been reported. Underreporting and sub-testing has been a major concern throughout the pandemic, and it may only get worse. In fact, a doctor is increasingly concerned about two hard-hit states that have pulled out of testing and appear to be missing numerous cases of the coronavirus: Florida and Texas.
“This is really concerning because testing is sort of the first step in determining the level of disease in a community”, Ashish jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in an interview with NPR. “If you can’t test people, you don’t really know how much disease there is [or] how much sickness you miss. And at the moment, I’m concerned that we’re missing a lot of cases in Texas, Florida, and other states. “
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On a female, a female doctor in protective gear holding and showing a tube of covid-19 and a sampling swab.
Florida’s testing rate is declining, according to John Hopkins University, with the state performing only about 1.6 tests per 1,000 people. And Texas only does 2.0 tests per 1,000. In comparison, New York City performs about 4.1 tests per 1,000 people and Massachusetts does about 2.7 tests per 1,000 people. What’s even more surprising is that Florida and Texas have both reported more than 40,000 new cases of the coronavirus in the past seven days. New York and Massachusetts, on the other hand, both saw less than 4,000 during the same period, The New York Times reports.
Jha says there’s a whole host of factors behind this drop in testing for these two conditions – none of them suggest it’s because fewer people are getting sick.
“We’ve all seen the stories about the really long delays,” Jha says, referring to some cases where it took at least 10 days to receive the results. “People are less willing to take a test if they don’t get a result soon.” He also stressed that the long waiting times were an obstacle to the rise of the initiative. “I think the barriers we’ve put in place to make testing simple and easy really deter a lot of people from getting tested,” he told NPR.
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According to a recent report from CNBC and Dynata, nearly 40% of tests come back too late to make a difference. Results must be returned within 48 hours and if returned more than 72 hours after testing, they are “almost useless,” Jha said in a previous interview with CNBC.
For example, if your test is negative and it takes 10 days for your test results to come back, you may have contracted the coronavirus within that time. Or, if you tested positive, you wouldn’t have known how to quarantine for those 10 days, which could easily lead to more secondary infections.
So, Jha is pushing for two things in Florida, Texas, and states where there is a similar problem: more tests and faster results. There is “a broad consensus in the public health community that we need several million tests a day,” he says. According to John Hopkins, this is simply not the case. Data shows that the United States has yet to administer more than a million tests in a single day. And for more on this key factor in the fight against the coronavirus, check out If you live here you should get tested for COVID every 2 days, study finds.
Video: Fauci: The coronavirus epidemic in the United States could exceed 100,000 new cases per day (CNBC)
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