Testing Bottlenecks Threaten N.Y.C.’s Ability to Contain Virus. California Overtakes NY For Most Cases in U.S

“Honestly, I don’t even really see the point in getting tested,” said one New Yorker who has waited nearly two weeks, with still no results.

Despite pledges from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to make testing widely accessible and effective, many people in the city who have gotten tested have waited more than a week to learn whether they had the coronavirus. Delays in test results could hinder New York’s ability to control the spread of the disease,

In early July, a quarter of coronavirus test results were returned within 24 hours, but another quarter of tests took more than six days, Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said.Now, the median wait time at some clinics in New York City is nine days.

Although the mayor and governor have urged New Yorkers to get tested regularly, some public health officials and laboratory executives worry that strategy isn’t sustainable. That’s partly because in New York officials haven’t been able to significantly expand state and city laboratories’ capacity for testing — meaning the delays could get worse before they get better. So far, the backlog does not seem to have contributed to an uptick in transmission. 

The demand for tests is growing faster than laboratories can handle it. That demand is likely to increase as schools begin to reopen — especially because some universities will require that students test negative for the virus before they can attend in-person classes. Mr. Cuomo defended the state’s testing performance on Thursday, noting that the national labs, like Quest Diagnostics, were “getting overwhelmed” by tests from other states.

There are dozens of CityMD walk-in clinics in New York, and thousands of people get tested at them each day. Many of those tests are sent to a lab in New Jersey run by Quest Diagnostics. Quest Diagnostics has provided several reasons that wait times are long, including the high level of demand from employees getting tested before returning to their workplaces.

Test result delays may undermine contact tracing, which alerts people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus so they can avoid spreading it to others. The combination of testing and tracing could be an important factor in warding off a second wave of the outbreak. As of late June, the city had hired 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors.

California Is Once Again at the Center of the Virus Crisis

The state was the first to issue a stay-at-home order, helping to control an early outbreak. It has now surpassed New York for the most known cases of the virus.

 

NY TIMES

When everything shut down in March as the coronavirus took off in California, Canter’s Deli, a mainstay in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, laid off dozens of employees. A few months later, it called them back to work. By then, the state appeared to have emerged from the initial virus crisis in much better shape than other parts of the country.

But now California’s caseload is exploding, with rising deaths and hospitalizations. As quickly as things had opened up, they have shut down again. California is now in the unwelcome position of having found itself at the center of the pandemic twice over.

 After a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record on Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.

And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America have collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself. Some localities have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days.

In many parts of San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, people do not leave home without a mask. In Huntington Beach, and across Orange County, residents have openly defied mask orders and protested against them.

In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.

A long line of cars near a testing site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles last week.Credit...Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images[/caption]

 

The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.

It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back-and-forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House.