The Trump administration estimates that by the end of the week health officials will be able to perform one million coronavirus tests, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Steven Hahn said on Monday.
It comes as the US went from reporting its first coronavirus death to six confirmed in Washington in a 48-hour period, as cases there surged to 18. In total, there are now 103 people infected in the US.
Health officials had previously warned that cases were bound to increase across the US as more tests were run, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was widely panned for lagging in distributing the tests, many of which turned out to be faulty.
In an effort to expand testing, a number of private companies, states and research institutions have been given authorization to make their own tests.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn said that by the end of this week, he expeccted that enough tests will be distributed to screen one million people in the US.
But it comes after the sudden uptick in cases in Washington – which had not reported a second case until this weekend – suggested that the virus may have been spreading in communities there for weeks.
Vice President Mike Pence (center) confirmed the deaths of six Americans from coronavirus as FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn (not pictured) said one million people could be tested for the virus by week’s end
Up until now, the US testing capacity was only between 75,000 and 100,00 kits, Dr Hahn said during a Monday press briefing.
But on Saturday, officials enacted a new policy clearing the way for non-CDC tests to be made and sent to labs across the country.
Validation processes could still take 15 days, however.
US health officials have also begun using the flu surveillance system to track coronavirus.
Two weeks ago, labs in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle started to test patients who had flu-like symptoms but tested negative for flu itself began testing those patients for coronavirus.
CDC Director Dr Robert Redfield said that the wider flu surveillance system – consisting of about 140 labs across the US – would be ‘activated in the near future’ to test even more people for the virus.
It comes after the CDC had to re-make a reagent in the test kit after some diagnostics were returning ‘inconclusive’ results.
Meanwhile, it was revealed that a woman confirmed to have coronavirus was not tested for it for for days because she didn’t initially fit the CDC’s criteria for testing as she had not recently traveled to or been in contact with anyone who had traveled to China.
Her eventual diagnosis signalled that the virus might be circulating in the Solano County community already.
The CDC is now investigating an issue in the manufacturing process and lab that was making the tests, where one FDA scientist said he saw ‘alarming’ signs of contamination.
More than 100 Americans now have coronavirus and six – all in Washington – have died
With more than 100 US labs hamstrung by the flawed tests they’d received, officials in New York last week began developing their own test.
Monday, President Trump met with heads of pharmaceutical firms to discuss their production of vaccines, treatments and tests for coronavirus.
With wider testing, even more cases of coronavirus are bound to be reported in the US.
In fact, Washington state health officials said they predicted coronavirus cases in King County, where the virus is circulating and has infected many residents of a long-term care home, could exceed those of flu in the county.
The US coronavirus task force, headed up by Vice President Mike Pence maintained that the risk of coronavirus to any given American remains low.
But, ‘the risk of exposure to people with possible identified cases can be high,’ said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Pence also announced that clinical trials for a vaccine should begin within six weeks and said ‘therapeutics could literally be availabe by this summer or early fall.’