The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Private labs, public efforts boost testing
Coronavirus testing capacity in Connecticut will grow significantly in the coming days with two private labs initiating testing, a move that is likely to help identify positive cases in the state.
By Monday, two companies — LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — will be processing coronavirus tests in their Connecticut laboratories, the companies said Thursday. The state public health lab in Rocky Hill is currently the sole testing provider in the state.
That means possibly dozens or hundreds of tests a day will be processed in Connecticut, up from a maximum of about 20.
Connecticut has one confirmed case of COVID-19. On
Friday night, officials said a
New York nurse working at Danbury and Norwalk hospitals has tested positive for the virus.
At Friday night’s news conference in Danbury, Renee Coleman-Mitchell, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, said 42 possible cases of coronavirus have been tested at the state lab in Rocky Hill. All have come back negative. Another 11 samples are in the queue to be considered, she said.
Like most states around the
testing has been limited in Connecticut by what critics say was a slow rollout of test kits by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February. As the epidemic spreads in the U.S. and the CDC permits more people to be tested, state officials, including Gov. Ned Lamont and Connecticut’s congressional delegation, have sounded the alarm that they can’t keep up with growing demands for tests.
“At this time, our state — home to 3.5 million people — only has sufficient diagnostic kits to test just over 500 individuals, and as the state moves to expand its capacity to test specimens beyond the state laboratory in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, to private sector laboratories and the state’s hospitals, it is critical that access to diagnostic testing kits becomes a reality,” the state’s five members of Congress wrote to the CDC Friday.
The Trump administration announced Friday night more tests would be widely available soon.
Vice President Mike Pence said between Monday and Thursday, federal officials distributed over 900,000 tests across the country. On Friday, another 200,000 tests will be shipped, Pence said. By the end of next week, 4 million tests will be shipped to state and local public health authorities, he said at a White House press briefing.
President Donald Trump signed an $8.3 billion coronavirus emergency bill Friday that will flood federal, state and local health officials with money to pay for virus containment and mitigation efforts, medical supplies, vaccine development and more. It’s unclear how much — or how soon — this funding could affect the availability of test kits.
Private sector testing — recently given a thumbs up from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — is now stepping in to help fill the gap.
LabCorp announced it started coronavirus testing in Connecticut at 6 p.m. on Thursday, said state epidemiologist Matthew Cartter. Quest Diagnostics said it would begin testing on Monday. Both labs require a medical provider’s order for the tests.
“This is really necessary,” said Cartter. “These are high volume laboratories that can handle thousands of specimens in a day.”
Within the next two weeks, acute care hospitals in Connecticut will be able to conduct the tests, the governor’s office said.
Lamont wrote to the director of the CDC Thursday to request more coronavirus testing kits be made available to the state. The state has received one kit with a capacity of 500 to 600 tests but Department of Public Health officials expect more soon.
The state’s public health laboratory in Rocky Hill has the ability to process 15 to 20 coronavirus specimens per day, Coleman-Mitchell said Thursday night. She and Cartter celebrated the news of the private sector testing on a telephone town hall with New Haven-area residents and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3.
The new testing by LapCorps and Quest will be the “primary way that people who are outpatients will get a coronavirus test,” Cartter said.
“Testing involves getting essentially a throat swab done,” Cartter said. “But that will not be done at the Quest labs where you go to get your blood drawn. It can only be done at a place where there is adequate protections for getting that throat swab from somebody.”
Until Thursday, coronavirus tests in Connecticut were reserved only for sick people in hospitals. “We are prioritizing this testing for patients that are hospitalized with symptoms so that our acute care hospitals can care for them,” ColemanMitchell said.
Quest and LabCorps are now able to run tests because the FDA recently changed its rules allowing companies that develop coronavirus tests to use them on patients.
Also, the CDC this week loosened its guidelines on who should receive a COVID-19 test. Now, a doctor can decide that a patient has symptoms, he or she can be tested.
“While on the surface, this approach seems reasonable, the resources available to meet this new demand are simply not adequate to ensure people most at risk get tested,” Lamont wrote in his letter to the CDC.
The Trump administracountry, tion promised this week that 1 million coronavirus tests would be conducted by Friday night. But on Thursday, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar acknowledged the real capacity would probably be about half that number by Friday night.
Azar told reporters Thursday that a private manufacturer, Iowa-based Integrated DNA Technologies, expects to ship more coronavirus kits to U.S. laboratories by week's end — an added capacity to test roughly 400,000 people.
But Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that national need for testing is far, far greater.
“We're going to need millions and millions and millions of tests,” he said on CNN Thursday night.
Officials have said the administration was slow to distribute tests and some of the early tests that were sent to states were faulty and provided inconclusive results.
On Tuesday, House Democrats informed the CDC in a letter they are launching an investigation into the CDC’s testing efforts.
emilie.munson@hearstdc.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson