Delays in getting test results hobble response

Washington— Test results for the novel coronavirus are taking so long to come back across the United States that experts say the results are often proving useless in the campaign to control the deadly disease.

Some testing sites are struggling to provide results in five to seven days. Others are taking longer. Outbreaks across the Sun Belt have strained labs beyond capacity. That rising demand, in turn, has caused shortages of swabs, chemical reagents and equipment as far away as New York.

The long testing turnaround times are making it impossible for the United States to replicate the central strategy used by other countries to effectively contain the virus: test, trace and isolate. Like catching any killer, speed is of the essence when it comes to the coronavirus.

“Instead of going from one step to the next, it’s like you’re already stumbling right out of the gate,” said Crystal Watson, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University. “It makes contact tracing almost useless. By the time a person is getting results, they already have symptoms, their contacts may already have symptoms and have gone on to infect others.”

After attending a funeral, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and her family got tested June 29 as a precaution.

A week later, her test results still hadn’t come back, but her husband started feeling ill. So they got a different, rapid test through Emory University. Within hours, Bottoms learned that she, her husband and one of the couple’s four children had become infected.

It wasn’t until the next day that their initial test results arrived. They showed that when the family first got tested, only one of them, a child, had the virus. While they waited for their test results, the boy possibly passed it to his parents.

“It really speaks to the failure of testing in this country right now,” Bottoms said Friday. “Had we known we had an asymptomatic child in the house, we would have immediately quarantined and taken all the precautions.”