2,000 Commercial Labs Will Be Tapped To Help Trump Administration Ramp Up Testing Amid Growing Criticism, Anger

The New York Times: Pence Pledges High-Speed Coronavirus Testing From 2,000 Labs This Week
Federal officials are moving ahead with plans to address the screaming shortage of testing for the coronavirus by setting up many more drive-through testing centers around the country and speeding the capability of commercial laboratories to process multiple samples at once. Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at a White House briefing with Vice President Mike Pence that starting on Monday, 2,000 commercial labs would begin to perform coronavirus tests using high-speed machines that can process many samples at once. Those labs are expected to add somewhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tests a week to the nation’s capacity, and 1.9 million tests should be available by the end of the week, Admiral Giroir said. (Grady, 3/15)

Reuters: Americans Will Have Access To More Than 2,000 Labs For Coronavirus Testing, Pence Says
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence promised on Sunday that Americans would have access in the days ahead to more than 2,000 laboratories capable of processing coronavirus tests, and a leading expert said the country would launch a new phase of testing for the fast-spreading disease. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Pence also said he and President Donald Trump would brief U.S. state governors on Monday on the widening testing amid a fast-escalating global health crisis. (3/15)

The Washington Post: Essential Details On White House Coronavirus Testing Still Murky After Pence News Conference
At a news conference, Vice President Pence and federal health officials said the first people allowed to use drive-through testing will be health-care workers and first responders, as well as people over 65 who have symptoms consistent with the virus, such as a cough. The officials did not explain exactly where or in how many states the drive-through tests would begin, other than to say it would be in hard-hit areas. And they backed away from an announcement by Trump on Friday that Google was on the verge of releasing a website through which any American could type in symptoms and learn whether they warranted a test. (Goldstein and McGinley, 3/15)

Stat: Coronavirus Testing Is Starting To Get Better — But It Has A Long Way To Go
Friday morning a ray of light cracked through the ominous cloud of the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus: The Swiss health care giant Roche introduced a new test for the virus that could be run more efficiently and with less manpower than existing diagnostics, potentially doubling the capacity in the U.S. to detect the virus. But the news only emphasizes the degree to which one of the world’s great technological powers, the leading country in generating new biotechnologies and medical advances, has stumbled to test patients when other nations, including most of Europe, China, and in particular South Korea, have been able to do so much more efficiently. (Herper, 3/13)

Bloomberg: Trump Administration Steps Up Coronavirus Testing Under Pressure 
The Food and Drug Administration announced it had approved the first rounds of high-volume testing, as well as allowing New York state to authorize labs to expand testing on their own. The Trump administration also appointed an official to take charge of coordinating testing among health agencies. The moves come after ample warnings this week, including from a top administration health official, that testing has so far been inadequate and that shortage of medical supplies may be looming. The virus’s spread has quickly emerged as a defining test of Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump has begun to pivot from downplaying the virus -- pledging the caseload would fall, only to see it jump sharply -- to pledging more would be done, amid warning signs. Trump announced new travel restrictions this week after a raucous debate among aides. (Wingrove and Webber, 3/13)

The Associated Press: Gov't Virus Testing Will Prioritize Medical Staff, Elderly
The federal government's effort to rapidly expand testing for the coronavirus will initially focus on screening health care workers and the elderly, Trump administration officials said Sunday. Broad-scale testing is a critical part of tracking and containing pandemics. But the U.S. effort has been hobbled by a series of missteps, including flaws with the testing kits first distributed by the federal government and bureaucratic hurdles that held up testing by private laboratories. (Perrone, 3/15)

Modern Healthcare: Frustrated By Slow Results, More Hospitals Seek Their Own COVID-19 Testing
The slow roll-out of testing for the coronavirus has prompted a more hospitals to develop their own diagnostic capabilities, which they say offers them the best chance to mitigate the impact of the outbreak. Delays in widespread testing began several weeks ago when the first kits developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were found to have a faulty compound that caused inaccurate results. (Johnson, 3/13)

ProPublica: How South Korea Scaled Coronavirus Testing While The U.S. Fell Dangerously Behind
In the aftermath of a 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that killed 38 people and cratered the economy, South Korea took a hard look at what had gone wrong. Among the findings: A lack of tests had prompted people ill with the disease to traipse from hospital to hospital in search of confirmation that they had MERS, a coronavirus far more virulent than the one that causes COVID-19. Nearly half the people who got the disease were exposed at hospitals. (Engelberg, Song and DePillis, 3/15)

The New York Times: Coronavirus Testing Goes Mobile In Seattle
On an overcast day in Seattle, a few dozen medical staff members, students and emergency workers with symptoms of the fast-spreading coronavirus spent their lunch break driving to a parking garage. The UW Medicine’s Medical Center Northwest has turned part of the first floor of their four-story parking garage into a mobile testing clinic. Think fast-food drive-through, but instead of getting served a juicy burger, nurses come to take a nasal swab. In about a day, patients find out whether they have the coronavirus. (Yan, 3/13)

Kaiser Health News: Testing Shortages Force Extreme Shift In Strategy By Local Health Officials
Public health officials in California’s state capital region announced this week they have stopped tracing the contacts of patients diagnosed with the novel coronavirus. They’ve also ceased recommending quarantines for residents exposed to people confirmed to have the virus. It was a grim recognition of the virus’ infiltration — and is yet another sign of the detrimental effects of a lack of capability in the U.S. to test people for the deadly coronavirus as it continues to spread. (Gold and Barry-Jester, 3/13)

Los Angeles Times: She Couldn't Get A U.S. Coronavirus Test So She Flew To China, Officials There Say
A Chinese citizen living in Massachusetts became ill this month, with symptoms consistent with the coronavirus. She went to a local hospital and asked to be tested three times, but was denied. Frustrated, she flew to China — and tested positive upon arrival. According to Chinese officials, who provided the details, she is one of the nation’s 114 imported coronavirus cases, the newest concern for the country where the coronavirus global pandemic began. (Su, 3/15)

Kaiser Health News: Looking For Answers After Coronavirus Contact? Welcome To The Gray Zone
Liz Lucas got a call Tuesday afternoon from a friend she’d interacted with closely at a journalism conference in New Orleans days earlier who had tested presumptively positive for coronavirus. She wondered what this meant for her and those around her, so she reached out to local and state health officials in Missouri for guidance. But like many others across the nation with similar concerns, she didn’t get the answers she sought and had to decide for herself what to do. (Ungar, 3/13)

ABC News: Fake Coronavirus Test Kits Seized At Los Angeles Airport 
Officers with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized what appear to be fake novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, tests at the Los Angeles International Airport, the agency said Saturday. The package had come from the United Kingdom on Thursday and contained various vials that manifested as pure water, but upon inspection contained white liquid and were labeled "Corona Virus 2019nconv (COVID-19)” and “Virus1 Test Kit," according to a statement from CBP. (Torres, 3/14)

PBS NewsHour: New York Launches Drive-Thru Testing Site For COVID-19
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has deployed the National Guard and created a one-mile containment zone around the town of New Rochelle, just north of New York City, where at least 158 cases of COVID-19 have been reported. And on Friday, the state launched its first drive-thru mobile testing facility in the region. (Booker, Weber and Fong, 3/14)

Kaiser Health News: How Intrepid Lab Sleuths Ramped Up Tests As Coronavirus Closed In
While officials in Washington, D.C., grappled with delays and red tape, two professional virus hunters raced to make thousands of tests available to detect the deadly new coronavirus sweeping the globe, hoping to stem its spread in the U.S. Dr. Keith Jerome, 56, and Dr. Alex Greninger, 38, of the esteemed University of Washington School of Medicine, have overseen the rollout of more than 4,000 tests, painstaking work that has confirmed the infection in hundreds of patients across the nation. (Aleccia, 3/16)