Testing is essential
Numbers will rise, but it’s vital to knowing where to focus efforts to keep people safe.
By now, social distancing along with basic hygiene methods such as coughing into your elbow, hand-washing for at least 20 seconds and avoiding touching your face should be second nature for all of us.
These measures are necessary to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, but on their own, they cannot hope to stem the tide against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus. For that to happen, the head of the World Health Organization had a message for the globe Monday: test, test, test.
“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded, and we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Test every suspected case. If they test positive, isolate them and find out who they have been in contact with two days before they developed symptoms and test those people, too.”
That’s strong advice, but it has been impossible to follow here in the United States. Access to testing is slowly increasing here, but so far, this most basic tool used by public health authorities to identify and fight a disease has been badly botched by the federal government, putting everyone at heightened risk.
Even as the outbreak grew throughout the country, people with symptoms that match those of COVID-19 — fever, cough, shortness of breath — were told they could not be tested due to a series of failures that led to the testing shortfall.
For reasons that are still unclear, the U.S. declined to use WHO’s coronavirus test, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deciding to develop its own. That in-house test proved to be faulty and it took time to develop a new one. In the meantime, bureaucratic red tape kept academic labs from developing their own test.
Initial CDC guidelines restricted who could be tested to those who traveled to an infected region or were in contact with someone who tested positive. Those procedures made sense when there was a limited number of tests available, but they remained intractable even as it became obvious that the virus was no longer a foreign threat and that thousands of undetected cases likely were already roaming free.
To compound the outrage when he visited the CDC on March 7, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that anyone who needed a test could get one. They couldn’t. Last Wednesday, when he spoke to the country and said testing capabilities were expanding rapidly, they still weren’t.
Things appear to be getting better, finally. The federal government, along with state officials and private partners, has begun to make testing more widely available.
Already, between Friday and Monday, the number of coronavirus tests performed in the U.S. doubled, from 20,000 to about 41,000. That’s not nearly enough. Compare our numbers with South Korea, where almost 250,000 people have been tested in a population about one-sixth the size of the U.S. But it’s a strong start.
In Texas, 200 people have been tested and another 300 are in the process, Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday afternoon at a news conference in San Antonio. Mobile testing facilities will allow testing of 10,000 people per week as soon as this week, he added.
Austin, Dallas and San Antonio have begun performing drive-thru testing, which allows people to be tested without leaving their vehicles, limiting exposure. Houston is set to start by midweek at sites in the city and the county, with those most at risk, including health care workers and first responders, getting tested first, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.
Just because more testing will become available doesn't mean everyone should get a test immediately. You should still contact your health care provider or health facility to discuss symptoms and medical history.
To be tested at a public health lab in Texas, you must still meet the state’s requirements, which include having symptoms and being part of an at-risk group, such as health care workers, those exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, or older adults and those with underlying health issues.
There are more than 4,460 cases in the U.S., at least 84 of them in Texas, according to Johns Hopkins University. With the increase in testing, the number of known cases will grow. But don’t panic, it’s just a more accurate picture of who has the virus than officials have yet been able to see — an important step in figuring out where to focus our resources most effectively to keep people safe.