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Trump Announces Plan to Ship 150 Million Rapid Coronavirus Tests Governors of both parties welcomed the plan, but some health experts noted limitations of the kits made by Abbott Laboratories.
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President Trump at the White House on Monday announced a plan to distribute 150 million rapid coronavirus tests purchased by the federal government to states, tribes and other jurisdictions in the coming months.
Experts praised the news as a welcome endorsement of the importance of rapid and widely available testing while the nation continues to struggle in its fight to rein in the coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 204,000 people in the United States.
But the test numbers cited by federal officials, experts said, are nowhere what is needed to contain the spread of the virus.
“I’m happy that they are trying to invest in technologies that would expand the number of tests that could be done in the U.S.,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That said, 150 million tests is really a very small drop in the bucket, considering how these tests are envisioned to be used.” ...
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Problems with Trump administration’s new rapid coronavirus tests
President Trump heralded new rapid coronavirus tests on Monday as game changers — fast, cheap and easy to use. But his administration’s deployment of the new tests to nursing homes has been plagued by poor communication, false results and a frustrating lack of planning, state leaders say.
Health officials in several states say they have been allowed no say in where the new tests are being sent and sometimes don’t know which nursing homes will receive them until the night before a shipment arrives. That has left some facilities ill-trained in how to use the tests and what to do with results. And it may be contributing to false-positive test results — when people are identified as being infected but aren’t.
The lack of federal planning also has left states with no standardized way to capture results from the new tests and include them in daily counts of infections and tests. Consequently, as the rapid tests become more widely distributed, the data and dashboards being used each day to guide the nation’s coronavirus response are becoming more inaccurate. ...