Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one hundred
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story
Speaker 1: in the US. We still don't have as many COVID
Speaker 1: tests as we need, and when people can get their
Speaker 1: hands on tests, they're not always reliable. But first, here's
Speaker 1: what happened in virus news today. The UK added London
Speaker 1: to its watch list of potential pandemic hotspots as coronavirus
Speaker 1: cases surge across the country. The move is fueling fears
Speaker 1: that the capital, which recorded six hundred and twenty new
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen cases on Thursday, could face the kind of
Speaker 1: local lockdown measures imposed on other cities. The no new
Speaker 1: restrictions will be put on London immediately. Its designation as
Speaker 1: an area of concern means extra testing will be made available,
Speaker 1: according to London Councils. In China, annual vaccine capacity is
Speaker 1: expected to reach six hundred and ten million doses by
Speaker 1: year end and one billion doses by the end of
Speaker 1: that's according to Jiang jongwe, an official at the National
Speaker 1: Health Commission. At a briefing in Beijing. Jang said prices
Speaker 1: will be affordable for the public, but did not give specifics.
Speaker 1: No serious cases of adverse reaction were reported yet in
Speaker 1: an emergency use program of China's innoculations, And finally, in
Speaker 1: the next few days, the world will officially record one
Speaker 1: million deaths from COVID nineteen, but the real tally might
Speaker 1: be almost double that. Actual fatalities from the worst pandemic
Speaker 1: in a century may be closer to one point eight million.
Speaker 1: The death toll could grow to as high as three
Speaker 1: million by the end of the year. Both projections are
Speaker 1: according to Alan Lopez, a laureate professor and director of
Speaker 1: the University of Melbourne's Global Burden of Disease Group. The
Speaker 1: coronavirus is rapid spread and transmission by people without symptoms
Speaker 1: mean that it has moved faster than our ability to
Speaker 1: do widespread testing. And now for today's main story, six
Speaker 1: months into the coronavirus pandemic, the US is still hamstrung
Speaker 1: by testing efforts. There simply aren't enough COVID nineteen tests,
Speaker 1: and even when there are tests available, they aren't always reliable.
Speaker 1: Here's you order, Kristin V. Brown on the free for
Speaker 1: roll that US coronavirus testing has become last month when
Speaker 1: nineteen people at a nursing home and Needham, Massachusetts, suddenly
Speaker 1: tested positive for COVID nineteen. It sent the facility into
Speaker 1: a tailspin. But North Hill Communities hadn't had any positive
Speaker 1: tests for weeks. That's North Hill CEO Ted Owens. He
Speaker 1: was especially worried because in the US, more than a
Speaker 1: third of deaths from the novel coronavirus have been connected
Speaker 1: to nursing homes. Massachusetts long term care facilities were especially
Speaker 1: hard hit emotionally. You get to the point where in
Speaker 1: the beginning, as people were dying, it was very stressful
Speaker 1: for the staff, and then things calmed down, things tapered down.
Speaker 1: He kind of got used to it, you know, you
Speaker 1: reached some sort of new normal, not completely, but you
Speaker 1: kind of adjusted to where things were. And then suddenly
Speaker 1: you go probably three weeks with no positives, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly you have nineteen positives that came out of the blue.
Speaker 1: At the height of the pandemic, dozens of staff members
Speaker 1: and residents had contracted the virus and nine residents had died,
Speaker 1: but they had figured things out and put infection control
Speaker 1: measures in place. Ted said that those positive results had
Speaker 1: instilled fear throughout the nursing home that a second wave
Speaker 1: of infection had come to the facility. But it turned
Speaker 1: out there wasn't a new wave of virus sweeping through
Speaker 1: the nursing home. The problem was the test. North Hill
Speaker 1: was one of about sixty nursing homes in Massachusetts that
Speaker 1: contracted with the Boston company called Origin. Origin is better
Speaker 1: known as a consumer DNA testing company, and not a
Speaker 1: very serious one. One of its tests actually hunts for
Speaker 1: superhero genes. But Ted didn't know any of this when
Speaker 1: he started using the company. In late June, the state
Speaker 1: ordered all nursing homes to do regular surveillance testing and
Speaker 1: gave them less than three weeks to set up a
Speaker 1: testing program. Ted doesn't know how he heard about Origin.
Speaker 1: He just knows it was a scramble to find any
Speaker 1: company that could complete the amount of testing he needed
Speaker 1: every week. At one point, the state did recommend Origin
Speaker 1: to nursing homes. My analogy is it was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're telling you that from now on you have to fly. Well,
Speaker 1: how do I fly? That's up to you. You figure
Speaker 1: that out. I'm just telling you what you need to do.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of what they did with the surveillance testing.
Speaker 1: They said, you need to do the surveillance testing, and
Speaker 1: it's up to you to figure out how to get
Speaker 1: it done. A few weeks into surveillance testing, when all
Speaker 1: of those positive results came back, ted thought it seemed odd,
Speaker 1: and he told the state Health Department that, but he
Speaker 1: still had to treat the results seriously. He sent the
Speaker 1: eighteen staff members who tested a positive home and asked
Speaker 1: other staff to work over time. He isolated the one
Speaker 1: resident who had tested positive, and he sent out a
Speaker 1: letter to all the family members of residents telling them
Speaker 1: what had happened. And, as you would expect, it through
Speaker 1: everyone into a panic. We were in scramble mode. So
Speaker 1: the first thing we did was we we started to
Speaker 1: do a complete audit of all our infection control procedures
Speaker 1: to try and figure out Initially, we just dissowned that
Speaker 1: somewhere there was a source of infection and we had
Speaker 1: missed it. It turned out that North Hill wasn't the
Speaker 1: only nursing home in Massachusetts going through this fire drill.
Speaker 1: The state investigation found that the company returned almost four
Speaker 1: hundred false positive results. At least eleven nursing homes were impacted.
Speaker 1: False positives are almost always the result of a laboratory error.
Speaker 1: They usually mean that somehow a sample was contaminated. This
Speaker 1: happened sometimes, but labs are supposed to have checked someplace
Speaker 1: to catch those errors. The state said the Origin didn't
Speaker 1: for ted. That meant spending tens of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: in overtime and sick time and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: where the virus had come from. It also meant really
Speaker 1: scaring people for no reason. I think about the fear
Speaker 1: that this instills in these nine year old people who
Speaker 1: are scared to begin with about this whole thing. And
Speaker 1: you know, we spend months trying to get them to
Speaker 1: calm down, to convince them that we're doing everything we
Speaker 1: can to keep them safe, that we're following all the
Speaker 1: protocols that are sent to us by c d C,
Speaker 1: the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Now, this wasn't the
Speaker 1: first time that Origin had run into lab issues. Last year,
Speaker 1: I reported a story in which former employees said that
Speaker 1: the company had generally troubling lab practices, including tampering with results.
Speaker 1: At the time, the company said that the former employees
Speaker 1: were disgruntled and called their accounts grossly inaccurate. A few
Speaker 1: years ago, Origin also grabbed headlines for not distinguishing a
Speaker 1: difference between DNA from a dog and DNA from a person.
Speaker 1: Origin is not even close to the only company that
Speaker 1: has had issues with its tests. Here is Davy Smith,
Speaker 1: the head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global
Speaker 1: Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. At
Speaker 1: the beginning of the epidemic, the CDC realized that there
Speaker 1: was going to be quality control issues, right, so they
Speaker 1: said only we could test, and that allowed them to
Speaker 1: have as much control over the quality because they knew
Speaker 1: exactly this is the one test that was done, this
Speaker 1: is how it was going to be diagnosed, and they
Speaker 1: would have all the data. So that's a very good
Speaker 1: top down quality control process. The problem was there was
Speaker 1: no way the CDC could do all the tests that
Speaker 1: were necessary, um that was needed in a pandemic. So
Speaker 1: the second thing they did was, Okay, you know what,
Speaker 1: everybody has machines in all these labs all across the country,
Speaker 1: and you can do your own tests, so we can
Speaker 1: democratize testing. So go out there and go forth and test.
Speaker 1: Amidst a massive shortage of tests, the fd a basically
Speaker 1: opened the floodgates. Making a basic COVID nineteen test in
Speaker 1: theory isn't all that difficult. A lot of labs have
Speaker 1: the equipment to do it. An Origin isn't even the
Speaker 1: weirdest company to pivot to COVID nineteen testing. There at
Speaker 1: least two companies that were previously best known for treating
Speaker 1: erectile's function that also now offer coronavirus tests. Origin did
Speaker 1: receive what's known as an emergency Youth authorization for its test,
Speaker 1: but the review process for that is just not all
Speaker 1: that rigorous, and as of last month, labs that develop
Speaker 1: their own tests like Origin won't even have to jump
Speaker 1: through that hoop. At the moment, it's a little bit
Speaker 1: of the wild West, because the demand is so great
Speaker 1: and the supply it is so small that anybody out
Speaker 1: there can make a test. You may recall other headlines
Speaker 1: about false results in recent months, including seventy seven false
Speaker 1: positives that sent the NFL spinning. The US needs more tests,
Speaker 1: but those tests just aren't all that valuable if they're
Speaker 1: not reliable, Davy said. We need better standards for internal
Speaker 1: quality control at labs, as well as a system that
Speaker 1: periodically checks to make sure labs are doing things properly
Speaker 1: rather than just responding once an issue comes up. There
Speaker 1: are always going to be contamination issues, and they're always
Speaker 1: going to be technical issues and personnel errors, and we're humans, etcetera.
Speaker 1: The trick is to be able to catch it early
Speaker 1: and to be able to have rigorous quality assurance practices
Speaker 1: that are both internal. So if I run a lab,
Speaker 1: I want to make sure that my what I give
Speaker 1: my results out are reproducible and correct, and I want
Speaker 1: to be able to have an external agency that checks
Speaker 1: all my homework. Davy said the free market is supposed
Speaker 1: to produce the best, most reliable products, but he said
Speaker 1: that is not what has happened during the pandemic. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I learned early on in this
Speaker 1: pandemic is that there wasn't if you had a task,
Speaker 1: there wasn't any competition you had. The demand for your
Speaker 1: test was so high that there was no Everybody was
Speaker 1: after you, and it didn't matter how good your quality was.
Speaker 1: The state of Massachusetts required Origin to submit a plan
Speaker 1: to fix its internal quality issues. The company is now
Speaker 1: waiting for a green light to resume testing in the
Speaker 1: state in a statement to Bloomberg Origins said that it
Speaker 1: is confident that it will resume operations soon and provide accurate,
Speaker 1: timely test results. The company said it has made a
Speaker 1: plan to address its shortcomings in the lab, including hiring
Speaker 1: outside consultants to review its processes and hiring a new
Speaker 1: vice president of operations and a director of quality assurance.
Speaker 1: The company said that is conducted more than forty thou tests,
Speaker 1: including for schools and nursing homes. It continues to sell
Speaker 1: its tests in other states. That was Kristin V. Brown
Speaker 1: and that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world,
Speaker 1: visit Bloomberg dot com, slash coronavirus and if you like
Speaker 1: the show, please leave us a review and a rating
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to
Speaker 1: help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily
Speaker 1: edition is produced by Topher foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson
Speaker 1: and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by
Speaker 1: Kristin V. Brown. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors
Speaker 1: are Francesco Levi and Rick Shawn Francesco Levie is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, MHM.