Alabama reported 57 more overnight deaths from the coronavirus, the state’s single-highest daily death total since the pandemic began.
State health officials also reported 1,338 new COVID-19 cases, its lowest toll since July 10.
Around the nation, laboratories are buckling under a surge of coronavirus tests, creating long processing delays experts say are undercutting the pandemic response.
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With the U.S. tally of infections at 3.9 million Wednesday and new cases surging, the bottlenecks are creating problems for workers kept off the job while awaiting results, nursing homes struggling to keep the virus out and for the labs themselves, dealing with a crushing workload.
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“There’s been this obsession with how many tests are we doing per day,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The question is how many tests are being done with results coming back within a day, where the individual tested is promptly isolated and their contacts are promptly warned.”
The testing lags in the U.S. come as the number of people confirmed to be infected globally passed a staggering 15 million Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. leads the world in cases as well as deaths, which stand at more than 142,000 nationwide. New York, once by far the U.S. leader in infections, has been surpassed by California, though that is partly due to robust testing in a state with more than twice the population of New York.
Guidelines issued by the CDC recommend that states lifting virus restrictions have testing turnaround time under four days. The agency is expected to soon issue new guidelines recommending against retesting COVID-19 patients to confirm they’ve recovered.
In Florida, as the state confirmed 9,785 new cases on Wednesday and the death toll rose to nearly 5,500, nursing homes have been under an order to test all employees every two weeks. But long delays for results have some questioning the point.
U.S. officials have recently called for ramping up screening to include seemingly healthy Americans who may be unknowingly spreading the disease in their communities. But Quest Diagnostics, one of the nation’s largest testing chains, said it can’t keep up with demand and most patients will face waits of a week or longer for results.
Quest has urged health care providers to cut down on tests from low-priority individuals, such as those without symptoms or any contact with someone who has tested positive.
The U.S. is testing more than 700,000 people per day, up from fewer than than 100,000 in March. Trump administration officials point out that roughly half of U.S. tests are performed on rapid systems that give results in about 15 minutes or in hospitals, which typically process tests in about 24 hours. But last month, that still left some 9 million tests going through laboratories, which have been plagued by limited chemicals, machines and kits to develop COVID-19 tests.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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