South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
State: Florida expands testing to detect infected people without symptoms.
An expansion of coronavirus testing will begin Monday, as the state attempts to address a persistent weakness in the government’s response to the pandemic.
At Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens and two other drive-thru locations, free tests will be offered to anyone with symptoms such as fever, a cough or shortness of breath. And free tests will be offered to anyone who had sustained contact with an infected person, even if the person seeking the test has no symptoms.
“This is a significant change,” said Mary Jo Trepka, chairwoman of the Epidemiology Department at Florida International University. “It’s thought that a large percentage of people who are infected with COVID-19 don’t have any symptoms. How large that is, I think, is still unknown. Some estimates are a quarter, or a half. We don’t know. The previous testing policy would not pick up those people at all.”
Under the previous policy, the state’s drive-thru centers tested only first responders, health care workers and people over 65, provided they had elevated temperatures and other symptoms. The new policy will help individuals know whether to isolate themselves or seek treatment. And it will help authorities track the course of the pandemic.
“I think that will give us a lot more information about what’s truly going on, in terms of the number of infections,” she said.
A lack of sufficient testing has been a problem across the United States from the beginning, hampering the ability of health authorities track the disease and fight it most effectively.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that the new policy would help push the state’s testing numbers higher. Currently, about 1 in 125 Floridians have been tested. By next week, he said, that number would improve to 1 in 100 Floridians. The total number tested should reach 215,000, he said.
He said testing people without symptoms would help address an important segment of people carrying the virus.
“We think that’s important because we’re trying to figure out how this is being spread by people who aren’t necessarily at risk of being hospitalized for it,” he said at a news conference in Tallahassee.
In addition to the Miami Gardens site, the tests will be offered at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando and TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville. The state is taking over the funding of the sites from the federal government. Appointments are not required.
There are difficulties, however. If someone takes a test a day or two after unknowingly contracting the virus, it may be too soon to get a positive result. And there are continued delays in obtaining test results.
José Szapocznik, chairman of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, described the change as an improvement but said it fell far short of what could have been done to halt the epidemic.
The standard way to fight an epidemic is to trace and test the contacts of every infected person. The expanded testing program would not involve such a procedure.
“It’s a very passive way of doing it,” he said. “It’s an advance, but not as much as could be done.”
Tracing every contact of an infected person would be difficult now, he said, with more than 18,000 cases in Florida. But had the state tried to do so early in the epidemic, he said, the task would have been manageable.
“It should have been done at the beginning,” he said. “Their problem now is they’re too late. The virus is so widespread that it would take a lot of personnel. It’s usually done with the first few cases. You start contacttracing to prevent it from spreading. “