California, Sacramento face coronavirus test shortage. Why the timing couldn’t be worse
Bottlenecks in the coronavirus testing kit supply chain are slowing California’s efforts to identify new cases of COVID-19, prompting alarm among virus experts who say it’s coming at a critical moment amid a surge in cases and hospitalizations.
Officials in California and around the country say the increasing demand for tests has once again overwhelmed labs and is now forcing California to triage testing amid the infection surge. It’s also leading to a slower turnaround time for test results; in many cases, patients who suspect they have COVID-19 are forced to wait more than a week for results.
“Commercial laboratories ... are becoming overwhelmed with large volumes of specimens, slowing down processing timelines” nationally, the California Department of Public Health wrote in an email Wednesday to The Sacramento Bee.
In response, “California has instructed all laboratories to prioritize the processing of specimens from high-risk groups, including individuals who are COVID-19 symptomatic and those who are hospitalized or in long-term care facilities.”
Public Health officials said they are studying the possibility of doing “pooled” testing, where samples from numerous people are merged and screened together.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he will announce a new testing strategy later this week or next week.
A lack of test kit materials forced Sacramento County this week to close five clinics in lower-income neighborhoods. The county’s testing lab for those clinics, UC Davis Medical Center, laments it is no longer receiving adequate shipments of testing supplies and has no idea when its supplier will be able to ship more.
State health officials this week stopped short of saying they are facing a testing crisis. The number of tests conducted in California had increased dramatically on a nearly daily basis since March, when few test kits and test kit materials were available. After topping out Sunday at 127,000 tests, though, that number dropped to 113,000 on Monday, then 103,000 on Tuesday.
Healthcare leaders and epidemiologists say the country needs even more and faster testing now, at a critical infection surge moment, and that any reduction in tests or slowdown in processing will leave health officials flying blind.
“If you can’t test, then how can you do tracing and isolation” of infected people? said Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine disease prevention professor and epidemiologist. “Testing is the foundation on which the response is built.
“When you inform Joe that sniffle he has is COVID-19 and he needs to stay home for two weeks, you prevent him from infecting five other people, and them infecting five others.”
Hospitals can’t help those who need it
UC Davis Health Chief David Lubarsky said he is frustrated by his institution’s inability at the moment to do what it considers its civic duty. UC bought two state-of-the-art testing machines this spring for $2 million and was using them to do the analysis from the five county testing sites in lower-income Sacramento communities until that program was shut down.
The partnership by the county and UC Davis included a now-closed test site at the La Familia Counseling Center in south Sacramento, where test results helped identify the higher prevalence of COVID-19 in the Latino community.
“I’m frustrated with the lack of my ability to serve people who desperately need UC Davis Health right now,” he said.
State officials say they are in contact with the Trump administration about the problem. Federal officials were slow to provide adequate test materials in March and April when the pandemic first hit. Since then, local governments have turned increasingly to private companies, and relied as well on testing from local sources.
“Now, we need the federal government more than ever to help us ensure that we have the supplies to process specimens timely,” the state public health department said in an email to The Bee.
State health officials echoed Lubarsky’s concern about inadequate testing in less affluent communities. “We still have much more work to ensure that the supply chain is stable and that we ensure adequate access to testing, particularly among low-income and minority communities.”
The state said it recently enlisted a California-based company to help build out a supply chain, saying that partnership is helping: “To date, we have distributed 3.4 million swabs, 2.2 million vials of viral media, and 414,000 specimen collection kits.”
Some counties have reported what they call slowdowns in recent days in the testing process, an indication that their labs are either overwhelmed or lacking supplies to do analyses in a timely fashion.
Placer County health chief Aimee Sisson said such test processing delays at commercial labs “create a delay in starting our contact tracing, and subsequently in timely notification of close contacts to quarantine.
“We and numerous other counties have communicated our concerns regarding the turnaround time to the state,” she told The Bee this week in an email.
Individuals who are seeking tests report delays now in getting appointments and notable delays in getting their results back.
Sacramento resident Beverly Turner has been mainly isolating at home and wearing a mask when she goes shopping. But after attending a barbecue at her boyfriend’s house, she worried that people did not practice enough social distance, so she had a test done on June 29, although she was showing no symptoms.
Nine days later, she is still awaiting test results and calls the situation unnerving, and even suspicious, based on statements by President Donald Trump opposing increased testing.
“Two weeks ago, the testing centers seemed to be begging for participants,” she said. “How do we go from an excess surplus into a supply crisis in a week?”