Chicagoans on edge as White House eyes agents
Amid a surge in gun violence and protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, the nation’s third-largest city is on edge, awaiting possible greater tension in the form of a plan by President
Donald Trump to dispatch dozens of federal agents to Chicago.
The White House plan emerged days after a downtown protest over a statute of Christopher Columbus devolved into a chaotic scene of police swinging batons and demonstrators hurling frozen water bottles, fireworks and other projectiles at officers. Then, on Tuesday in another neighborhood, a spray of bullets from a car passing a gang member’s funeral wounded 15 people and sent dozens running for their lives.
“I’ve never seen things worse in this city than they are right now,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest and activist on the city’s South Side.
WASHINGTON — Laboratories across the U.S. are buckling under a surge of coronavirus tests, creating long processing delays that experts say are undercutting the pandemic response.
With the U.S. tally of infections at 3.9 million Wednesday and new cases surging, the bottlenecks are creating problems for workers kept off the job while awaiting results, nursing homes struggling to keep the virus out and for the labs themselves, dealing with a crushing workload.
Some labs are taking weeks to return COVID-19 results, exacerbating fears that asymptomatic people could be spreading the virus if they don’t isolate while they wait.
“There’s been this obsession with, ‘How many tests are we doing per day?’” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The question is how many tests are being done with results coming back within a day, where the individual tested is promptly isolated and their contacts are promptly warned.”
Frieden and other public health experts have called on states to publicly report testing turnaround times, calling it an essential metric to measure progress against the virus.
The testing lags in the U.S. come as the number of people confirmed to be infected globally passed a staggering 15 million on Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Guidelines issued by the CDC recommend that states lifting virus restrictions have testing turnaround time under four days. The agency recently issued new recommendations against retesting most COVID-19 patients to confirm they’ve recovered.
Beyond the economic hurt the testing lags can cause, they pose major health risks.
In Florida, as the state confirmed 9,785 new cases on Wednesday and the death toll rose to nearly 5,500, nursing homes have been under an order to test all employees every two weeks. But long delays for results have some questioning the point.
Jay Solomon, CEO of Aviva in Sarasota, a senior community with a nursing home and assisted living facility, said results were taking up to 10 days to come back.
“It’s almost like, what are we accomplishing in that time?” Solomon said. “If that person is not quarantined in that 7-10 days, are they spreading without realizing it?”
Test results that come back after two or three days are nearly worthless, many health experts say, because by then the window for tracing the person’s contacts to prevent additional infections has essentially closed.
Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said it’s reasonable to tell people awaiting test results to isolate for 24 hours, but the delays have been unacceptable.
U.S. officials have recently called for ramping up screening to include seemingly healthy Americans who may be unknowingly spreading the disease in their communities. But Quest Diagnostics, one of the nation’s largest testing chains, said it can’t keep up with demand and most patients will face waits of a week or longer for results.
Quest has urged health care providers to cut down on tests from low-priority individuals, such as those without symptoms or any contact with someone who has tested positive.