Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, July one. I'm Oscar Ramires from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: It's happening again. As we moved to reopen the country,
Speaker 1: cases are starting to surge and the demand for testing
Speaker 1: is increasing. But testing shortfalls are causing long lines and
Speaker 1: hard hit states such as Florida and Texas without a vaccine.
Speaker 1: Testing has become the first line of defense, and delays
Speaker 1: complicate everything. M a court healthcare reporter at Bloomberg News
Speaker 1: joins us for how testing is hitting a snag again.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, Emma. Thanks. It seems that we
Speaker 1: are back at it again some of the same bad
Speaker 1: news we were hearing at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaker 1: We're starting to see cases rise across the country and
Speaker 1: that's making people want to go get tested even more.
Speaker 1: But as I mentioned once again, the whole country is
Speaker 1: grappling with a shortfall of testing and we can't seem
Speaker 1: to get over it, even though we are testing much
Speaker 1: much more this time around. Emma, tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about it. The challenge here is, you know, in
Speaker 1: the early days of the pandemic, right there was a
Speaker 1: shortfall of testing, people couldn't get tested, and that proved
Speaker 1: to be an impediment for other efforts to contain the
Speaker 1: viruses spread things like contact tracing other public health work.
Speaker 1: We're finding ourselves in a somewhat similar situation today, even
Speaker 1: though testing capacity has expanded significantly from that early kind
Speaker 1: of period. I think the best way to explain it
Speaker 1: really kind of comes down to those two core ideas
Speaker 1: of supply and demands. So testing supplies both swabs that
Speaker 1: take you know, test sample to the sort of materials
Speaker 1: that preserve it while it's transported to the lad to
Speaker 1: the equipment that runs the test itself. Processes that test
Speaker 1: these different parts of the supply chain have all come
Speaker 1: under strain, you know, over the last couple of months,
Speaker 1: and even though these aspects have been alleviated of our time,
Speaker 1: they haven't been in high rely solved. Now, whether it's
Speaker 1: even possible to solve it as a whole another question, right,
Speaker 1: But even as you have these persistent problems around supply
Speaker 1: and being able to supply test to the American public,
Speaker 1: you also have demand getting really ratcheted up with the reopenings.
Speaker 1: Now you have nursing homes trying to test all of
Speaker 1: their employees. You have employers saying that they want to
Speaker 1: maybe provide testing to their employees as well. You have
Speaker 1: people who haven't even necessarily come into contact with someone
Speaker 1: who has been infection wanting to get tested just to
Speaker 1: be sure, right before they gather with members of their family,
Speaker 1: for instance, or in social settings and things like that.
Speaker 1: So all of these things taken together, got it out
Speaker 1: of the problem, and we're starting to see that problem
Speaker 1: coming out in these hot spot states that have begun
Speaker 1: to emerge, like Texas, you know, like Arizona, working long
Speaker 1: lines outside of urgent care centers. For instance, hospital I
Speaker 1: spoke to in Houston said their lab had gotten a
Speaker 1: double amount of testing volume in the prior sort of
Speaker 1: weak plus. So these are problems that are beginning to
Speaker 1: bubble up in these new focuses of the pandemics, these
Speaker 1: parts of the country that are a new focus of
Speaker 1: the pandemic. And unfortunately, I think with the trajectory being
Speaker 1: what it is, you know, it sounds like these problems
Speaker 1: are going to continue over time. You mentioned Texas specifically,
Speaker 1: they have pretty robust setups for testing. I think they
Speaker 1: converted a few high school football stadiums or something like that,
Speaker 1: so that people can roll through and get tested, and
Speaker 1: even then, you know, by midday, mid morning or whatever,
Speaker 1: they've reached their capacity and they have to turn people away.
Speaker 1: So what's it's translating to is really long wait times
Speaker 1: to actually get tested and then longer wait times to
Speaker 1: get those results back as well. And we're seeing the
Speaker 1: cases surge throughout the United States and a bunch of
Speaker 1: states are having to roll back the reopening procedures because
Speaker 1: of all these surgeon cases. What's important to note here
Speaker 1: is like in Texas in particular, we did some reporting
Speaker 1: in that state, and you know, it wasn't just getting
Speaker 1: into get the test, which in many places you have
Speaker 1: to in text if you basically have to get an
Speaker 1: appointment to get tested, So you might wait a week
Speaker 1: or something like that just to go get tested, and
Speaker 1: then at that point we're likely to see waits for
Speaker 1: test results increase to you know, one of the big
Speaker 1: trade groups that represents the big commercial abs here in
Speaker 1: the US said basically, they're forecasting a real big surge
Speaker 1: in demand in the coming weeks and they're expecting that
Speaker 1: that made the lay test results. Importantly, when you wait
Speaker 1: a long time for test results. I mean a week
Speaker 1: is an extreme scenario, but even having to wait a
Speaker 1: couple of days, that's an amount of time that maybe
Speaker 1: if you're thinking, oh, I probably don't have COVID nineteen,
Speaker 1: I can go about my life, I can go to work,
Speaker 1: things like that. You know, that adds risk into the
Speaker 1: equation basically, and so the longer you wait for test results,
Speaker 1: the more likely this risk is going to compound. President
Speaker 1: Trump has said a lot that we've built the biggest
Speaker 1: testing system you know of everybody. The US process about
Speaker 1: five fifty seven thousand tests each day on average over
Speaker 1: the last week. But then the current outbreak, they say
Speaker 1: that we need millions, two to four million tests a
Speaker 1: day to really kind of track all of this stuff.
Speaker 1: The burden is all on the states. They get limited
Speaker 1: supplies and they have to allocate all that. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of a whole ripple effect because it's tough to
Speaker 1: keep that in track. And then beyond that, when it
Speaker 1: comes to contact tracing, all these delays make it much
Speaker 1: much harder to do all that contact tracing. As you
Speaker 1: were just mentioning, people go about their business not getting
Speaker 1: a test, and they can be infecting people and not
Speaker 1: really know it. What's important to note is we already
Speaker 1: have evidence in parts of the country that the virus
Speaker 1: is spreading in a sustained way in the community. And
Speaker 1: so this is a point where contact tracing systems, if
Speaker 1: they're not already you know, established and robust, can easily
Speaker 1: get overwhelmed. Um when you have really large numbers in cases.
Speaker 1: For instance, I spoke with an official with UT system
Speaker 1: and because who said, basically, you know, you have six
Speaker 1: and four hundred new cases one day, and you keep
Speaker 1: getting those kinds of members each day. You know, a
Speaker 1: local health department just can't keep up right, They're gonna
Speaker 1: get overwhelmed. And so I mean, ideally you wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to get to this point. But when you have like
Speaker 1: delays and test results, or you have for instance, aging
Speaker 1: infrastructure where test results are getting reported by FATS, that
Speaker 1: flows down the process, and that's kind of where we
Speaker 1: are in the US. I mean, I don't think it
Speaker 1: can be under emphasized at this point that we have
Speaker 1: not invested in the kinds of infrastructure we need to
Speaker 1: get this infection under control. But it's not too late.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of public health experts say we
Speaker 1: can still take these kinds of steps. We can still
Speaker 1: invest in public health infrastructure. We can still make more
Speaker 1: robust systems for testing. We can test smarter. That's when
Speaker 1: a lot of people have also said, maybe the focus
Speaker 1: shouldn't be on testing everyone. Maybe we should focus on
Speaker 1: the places where there's most likely to be transmission and
Speaker 1: also be smarter about how we reopen. What are the
Speaker 1: places in which the virus is most likely to sort
Speaker 1: of run in the community that increasingly seems to be bars, right.
Speaker 1: We've heard that become a big talking point coming out
Speaker 1: of states where these hot spots of emerged. You know,
Speaker 1: Texas closed the bars late last week. We've heard Florida
Speaker 1: moved towards taking similar steps as well. So I think
Speaker 1: there are some questions about if our infrastructure isn't up
Speaker 1: to snow, are there ways we can tell our approach
Speaker 1: in a better manner and a court healthcare reporter at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm Oscar Ramirez and this is reopening America. Don't forget effort.
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