California still way behind on coronavirus testing
LOS ANGELES — State health officials have ramped up coronavirus testing in recent days, but California still lags behind most other states, leaving potentially thousands of undiagnosed patients to unknowingly spread the infections.
As of Tuesday, California said it had results for 143,172 tests — or 362 per 100,000 people. That’s a sharp increase from two weeks ago when just 39 of every 100,000 residents had been tested.
Yet for all its deep sources of innovation, the state is behind the national average of 596 tests per 100,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project. In New York, which has far more people hospitalized with severe symptoms, testing has reached 1,748 of every 100,000.
Some California patients continue to wait many days for results. And for those without symptoms such as a fever, it continues to be extremely difficult to get a test.
The slow testing has been the source of frustration and alarm from public health officials, who say it has limited their understanding of infection patterns and made it harder to slow the coronavirus.
“It’s really important for us to know if they’re positive,” said Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s public health director last week, expressing concern that some patients were still waiting 12 days for results. “Both for their medical treatment but also so that we can immediately move those people into isolation, identify their close contacts and have their close contacts quarantined.”
While California has not seen the death toll of hot spots such as New York, Ferrer and other county health officials said improving testing is an essential tool the state should be better utilizing. California has recorded 450 deaths and more than 17,000 confirmed cases.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday offered a “sense of optimism” to Californians about bending the coronavirus curve. “It is bending, but it’s also stretching,” Newsom said.
Bending the curve means reducing the transmission of the virus to prevent a sudden and large increase of patients with COVID-19. Instead of a rapid surge, infections grow more gradually, essentially “stretching” out a bell curve over time, as Newsom said, to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system with more seriously sick patients than resources to treat them. The state has said it expects a peak sometime in May.
On Saturday, Newsom said the state had turned a corner on testing. He said he was taking responsibility for the state’s poor performance and had created a task force that would work to boost testing five-fold by month’s end.
“It’s a new day,” he declared. “I want to make sure this new promise can materialize.”
Some hospital and university labs have improved from what they describe as “crisis mode” to processing hundreds if not thousands of tests a day. A massive backlog of samples waiting at commercial labs and other facilities has fallen to a fraction of its 60,000-test peak. And Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Monday that he would expand testing of people showing symptoms of the virus to sites across the city.