The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Conn. lags in testing among region
Neighboring states testing higher percentage of their residents
The state has tested a lower percentage of its residents for the coronavirus than neighboring New York, but Connecticut authorities are pledging to step up testing.
As of Sunday evening, 23,270 coronavirus tests had been performed in Connecticut, compared to 283,621 in New York state.
That translates to about 0.65 percent of Connecticut’s population being tested for coronavirus, as of Sunday night.
Meanwhile, more than 1.45 percent of New York state’s total population has been tested.
“We’ve been actively trying to boost our testing capacity through both the public lab and private labs,” said Max Reiss, spokesman for Gov. Ned Lamont, who announced a testing push on Friday.
Lamont said the state has “ramped up our testing quite a bit.”
Stamford-based laboratory Sema4 is expected to provide as many as 1,250 tests to the state by this week, Lamont said.
A 15-minute test developed by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories was debuted in Detroit on April 1, and Lamont said it was already in use at Stamford Hospital.
“That’s almost in real time,” he said. “What a difference that will make.”
After the FDA granted the company emergency use authorization, Abbott said it expected to distribute 50,000 of the tests to health care professionals, though only 5,500 will remain in the United States, according to documents obtained by Kaiser Health News.
When it comes to the number of tests performed, New York is the outlier — Connecticut is on par with, if a little behind, other states in the region.
Pennsylvania has done 70,030 tests, about double the number of tests as Connecticut, though it
translates into 0.54 percent of its population.
There have been 75,356 tests in New Jersey, and 68,800 in Massachusetts, and both have tested a larger percentage of their populations than Connecticut.
Late last month, Lamont warned that testing in Connecticut was lagging. He said during a briefing on March 25 that shortages of personal protective equipment and reagents — the substance that creates the chemical reaction during a test — were to blame.
“The rate of infection is up and we’re not doing quite as many tests right now,” Lamont said then. “We’re still looking to do everything we can to make sure we have the reagents and other devices to make the tests go.”
The following day, Lamont said tests would be administered only to frontline health care workers and patients hospitalized with a suspected coronavirus infection.
“In the meantime, I’m going to put much more emphasis on self-diagnosis,” he said.
By contrast, New York has adopted a stance of aggressive testing. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that New York-based Regeneron Pharmaceuticals would create 500,000 test kits for the state at no charge, doling out 25,000 each day.
“Rapid testing is the fastest way to return to normalcy and get the economy back up and running, and will also help end the anxiety that has become the most oppressive part of this situation,” Cuomo said last week.
An average of about 1,300 tests are performed each day in Connecticut.
Testing for coronavirus has been a nationwide concern. President Donald Trump said on March 30 that, “We have done more tests, by far, than any country in the world, by far,” though that claim does require some context.
There have been more than 1.64 million tests in the United States, about 0.5 percent of the population. South Korea, which has been widely praised for its aggressive testing tactics, has done less than half of the number of tests — more than 440,000 as of Friday — but a much larger percentage of the total population.
The real difference between the two nations is what happens after the tests are performed.
Josh Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at Johns Hopkins University, said Friday during a public talk with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., that the post-test analysis is where South Korea has excelled.
The United States is ramping up testing capacity, but Sharfstein said we still have a long way to go “to get to the level of access to testing that we will need.”
“The status right now is that the United States is testing more every day,” he said. “I’m more optimistic in the short term about getting more tests than I am about getting the followup to the tests that we really need.”
The number of tests is only one bottleneck for researchers, according to Yale School of Medicine Epidemiologist Ted Cohen, who said there are “several levels” of holes in the data.
“We still don't know enough about how many incident infections are actually symptomatic, how many symptomatic people actually present for diagnosis, how many of those that present for diagnosis actually get tested, what are the results of the tests, the operational characteristics of the tests, how many of those individuals get hospitalized, how many of those require ICU care, how many of those end up dying,” he said.
According to Cohen, without that data, it’s difficult for academics and policy makers to say, “OK, given what we’ve observed, we think this is the current status of the epidemic.”