Federal health officials met with state and city public health labs on Wednesday to fix a crippling lack of options to diagnose the novel coronavirus, a shortfall driven by botched CDC testing kits. As a result, New York state and New York City are moving forward with developing their own test to detect the virus.



The lack of adequate testing capabilities was spotlighted on Wednesday evening, when the CDC announced delayed results of the first potential case of a person contracting COVID-19 from “community spread,” meaning they got sick without traveling to China or being exposed to anyone known to have the virus.

Early in February, the CDC released a US genetic test for the virus, sent to about 100 state and major city labs as well as overseas ones. Test kits contained enough ingredients to test a few hundred people for the novel coronavirus. The test proved unreliable in validation tests run by labs, however, leaving fewer than a dozen of the labs nationwide confident of the results. Only the CDC and labs in Illinois, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Nebraska, could run tests, according to ProPublica.

The shortfall figured in the extended diagnosis of the Solano County, California, woman reported Wednesday night as the first person in the US with COVID-19 from community exposure. UC Davis Medical Center said that her test results were delayed because neither the county or state lab could run them, and because her symptoms did not initially meet federal diagnostic criteria. The test took four days to approve, and a week later, the CDC announced that the patient had tested positive.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed frustration with the test shortfall at a news conference on Thursday.

The episode is spurring concern over US testing capabilities among public health officials, as cities and states gear up for possible outbreaks across the country. As the CDC scrambles to fix its original test, officials in New York have decided to push forward on developing their own.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but the agency's Chris Braden spoke late on Thursday at a Solano County news conference, where he said that the criteria for testing patients had changed between Feb. 19 and Feb. 23 when the decision was made to actually test the suspected community spread patient.

“What I can say is that there were multiple people involved in the decision over those four days," said Braden. "It wasn’t necessarily CDC."

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the CDC and other federal scientists would no longer be allowed to make public addresses about the outbreak without the approval of Vice President Mike Pence, following President Donald Trump appointing him to oversee all coronavirus-related responses.



The novel coronavirus is now responsible for more than 80,000 cases worldwide and over 2,800 deaths, with 60 cases in the US. South Korea has run about 30,000 tests, and Hong Kong is testing over a thousand people a day, while the US has only tested a total of 445.

"The case from yesterday is obviously giving the CDC a lot to consider in terms of revising those protocols so that more individuals will be tested with symptoms that might be identified as common pneumonia without a clear source," said Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, at the news conference.