North Carolina has more than 10.5 million people. And just 250 coronavirus tests left.
Where are the promised coronavirus test kits for North Carolina, members of the state’s federal delegation asked in a Wednesday letter to Vice President Mike Pence.
Sen. Thom Tillis and Reps. David Price and Richard Hudson said in the letter that “North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services has made us aware that supplies for test kits are not yet adequate for the expected demand.”
And despite assurances that the Centers for Disease Control has distributed more tests and ramped up production, they continued, “North Carolina has not yet received additional test kits, which the CDC had indicated would be delivered this week at the latest.”
Tillis and Hudson are Republicans. Price is a Democrat.
Pence is leading the federal government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, which the World Health Organization said Wednesday is now a pandemic.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said at Wednesday news conference in Charlotte that the state has not received all of the testing supplies it needs form the CDC to continue testing in the way it wants.
‘Things will get worse’
There are 1,050 cases in the United States, including 29 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
“We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told lawmakers Wednesday. Fauci is the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease.
North Carolina has eight people who have tested positive with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. A ninth North Carolina resident, from Durham, has tested postive in another state.
The most recent cases in North Carolina were announced Monday and Wednesday, and are connected to a Biogen biotech corporate conference in Boston last month.
The patients were put in isolation while officials identify close contacts.
Officials remain wary of “community spread” of the virus, meaning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people in a particular area are infected but are not sure how or where it happened.
The state has tested just 44 individuals, state officials said at a news conference on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, NC Health Director Elizabeth Tilson said the state lab has the capacity to test 250 people. She said LabCorp, a private North Carolina-based health care diagnostic company, has additional tests, but Tilson does not have that number.
State officials did not offer a timeline for when they might have the capacity to test as many people as they would like.
“The more people that we can get tested, the more we will know. That has been a priority for us,” Cooper said. “The scramble now is to get people tested. ... We have to know what we are dealing with.”
North Carolina’s population is estimated to be more than 10.5 million, making it the ninth-most populous state in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In their letter, the North Carolina lawmakers said the CDC has distributed 75,000 tests. On Saturday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that 75,000 of the CDC-produced tests would be out in the field at public health labs by the end of the weekend, and that 1 million commercial lab tests, using the CDC formula, were being validated for shipment.
Pence said on Tuesday that those shipments had been made and to expect that number to reach 4 million by week’s end.
Commercial labs brought in
Members of the task force have said that the president’s decision to turn quickly to commercial labs has been necessary to reach scale at a rapid pace. Private companies, including LabCorp and Quest, can now produce their own test.
“When the president brought the commercial labs in, he did exactly the right thing because it’s those big companies that have logistics, infrastructure all over the country, have labs all over the country, that can distribute the tests, process the tests,” Pence told reporters on Tuesday.
USA Today and Politico have reported that a shortage of a key component in the test could produce more delays.
The CDC is working to “bring that test closer and closer and closer to the patient and to the bedside,” Azar said on Monday.
Congress approved and President Donald Trump signed an $8.3 billion supplemental spending package last week to help fight the coronavirus. North Carolina will receive more than $13.8 million from the CDC to support its response to virus.
“We are concerned that we’re probably not hitting as many people as we want to,” Tillis told The News & Observer on Tuesday about the lack of tests. “I know a lot of that is mobilizing the availability of the tests. You’ve got to manufacture them before you can make them available. So we’ve asked questions about if they’re available, are they where they’re supposed to be?”
Rep. Mark Meadows, Trump’s incoming White House Chief of Staff, tested negative for the virus after coming into contact with someone who tested positive. Meadows was not symptomatic and does not fit into the high-risk category for testing with a limited supply, The Washington Post reported.
The NC DHHS say that “it is not necessary for everyone to be tested for COVID-19 at this time,” but that those who have a fever or lower respiratory symptoms and close contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case within the past 14 days should be tested. And those with a fever and lower respiratory symptoms and a negative rapid flu test should also be tested.
There has been a delay in producing the test, Azar said, “because there was a manufacturing scale-up issue when CDC tried to replicate the test by these other labs.”
“That’s the only issue that happened,” Azar said. “It was never that the test itself was faulty, defective, unavailable.”
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published March 11, 2020 at 2:31 PM with the headline "North Carolina has more than 10.5 million people. And just 250 coronavirus tests left.."
