When a stay-at-home order in March all but closed the revered labs of gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, her team at the University of California, Berkeley dropped everything and started testing for the coronavirus.They expected their institute to be inundated with samples since it was offering the
When a stay-at-home order in March all but closed the revered labs of gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, her team at the University of California, Berkeley dropped everything and started testing for the coronavirus.
The inability of the United States to provide broad diagnostic testing, widely seen as a pivotal failing in the nation’s effort to contain the virus, has been traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration, and supply shortages of swabs and masks.
In recent days, President Donald Trump has delivered a mixed message on testing, saying on May 11 that in ramping up, “we have met the moment, and we have prevailed”; while a few days later, he suggested that testing was “overrated” and that the high number of cases in the United States could be traced to more prevalent testing.
Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day — and as many as 20 million — to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested.
As a result, it is much harder for labs like the one in Berkeley to join the national effort to ramp up testing. “We are now reaping what we sowed for the last several decades,” said Dr. Geoffrey Baird, interim chairman of Laboratory Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, which operates one of the biggest academic clinical labs in the country. “It’s not a six-week-solvable problem. It’s not, buy more tests, get more swabs, and all of a sudden, we’re going to have a public health system.
“We would come to these entities and say, ‘Hi, we hear you have problems,’” Urnov recalled. “And they said, ‘Well, you have to basically work with our EHR,’” the acronym for electronic health records. Puzzled by the low volume, the executive, Dean Tassone, Eurofin’s vice president for payer services, said he wrote to a host of state and federal officials, including representatives of the White House coronavirus task force. He said he found it “bizarre” that so many governors have talked about a lack of available testing.
The biggest lab companies have also been buying up smaller competitors and negotiating exclusive arrangements with major insurers like UnitedHealth and Aetna, part of CVS Health.
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