Trump administration's new rapid coronavirus tests plagued by confusion and a lack of planning
President Trump heralded new rapid coronavirus tests on Monday as game changers — fast, cheap and easy to use. But his administration’s deployment of the new tests to nursing homes has been plagued by poor communication, false results and a frustrating lack of planning, state leaders say.
Health officials in several states say they have been allowed no say in where the new tests are being sent and sometimes don’t know which nursing homes will receive them until the night before a shipment arrives. That has left some facilities ill-trained in how to use the tests and what to do with results. And it may be contributing to false-positive test results — when people are identified as being infected but aren’t.
The lack of federal planning also has left states with no standardized way to capture results from the new tests and include them in daily counts of infections and tests. Consequently, as the rapid tests become more widely distributed, the data and dashboards being used each day to guide the nation’s coronavirus response are becoming more inaccurate.
“This is data we need, and there’s just no way of capturing it,” Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine said. “We need a reporting structure and not just hundreds of faxes being randomly sent from nursing homes and other facilities.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-administrations-new-rapid-coronavirus-tests-plagued-by-confusion-and-a-lack-of-planning/ar-BB19xtbE?li=BBnb7Kz
The Trump kakistocracy at work.
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