Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
More Testing Challenges Come With Surges In COVID Cases
The United States still doesn鈥檛 have a handle on testing six months into the coronavirus pandemic. The nation has conducted more than 4 million tests in the past week, more than ever before. But big jumps in testing capacity have been effectively erased by record-breaking increases in new infections as states reopen their economies. The supply chain problems that hampered testing early on never entirely went away and still threaten the ability of labs to conduct testing for everyone asking. (Lim and Miranda Ollstein, 7/5)
US health officials are increasingly proposing pooled testing -- mixing several people's biological samples and examining them in a single test -- to drastically boost the country's capacity to identify and contain coronavirus cases. The benefits could be plenty. Health experts say more surveillance testing -- especially to find infected people who are without symptoms -- could help contain the spread and let places like schools stay open safely. (Hanna, 7/6)
In places such as Arizona and Florida where case counts are soaring, on-the-ground reports indicate that testing sites are overwhelmed and contact-tracing efforts are falling short -
Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix said on Sunday that with cases and death counts soaring in Arizona, testing sites in her city and surrounding Maricopa County are overwhelmed, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has rebuffed her pleas for help. She raised the issue on the ABC program 鈥淭his Week,鈥 saying that it 鈥渇eels like they鈥檙e declaring victory while we鈥檙e in crisis mode.鈥 (7/5)
When Shaila Rivera and her new husband returned home from their honeymoon and tested positive for Covid-19, they expected a phone call from their local health authorities in Florida asking for a list of people they'd been near so that contact tracing could begin. The Riveras waited for that phone call. And waited. And waited. But the call never came. (Cohen and Vigue, 7/6)
Also, the New York Times offers a view into the life of a tracer -
Kimberly Jocelyn is a contract tracing supervisor with New York City Health and Hospitals Test & Trace Corps, which has, since May, employed more than 3,000 researchers, callers and field workers in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid-19. Earlier this year, Ms. Jocelyn, 29 and a recent graduate of Columbia University鈥檚 School of Public Health, worked at the CDC Quarantine Station at Kennedy International Airport. Now she is working from her home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where she leads a team of 15 contact tracers. Most Sundays she is on the job, but she doesn鈥檛 mind. (La Gorce, 7/3)
