Although some #covid19 results can be delivered within hours, 10-day wait times are not unusual for results from the most common test — the kind that uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to look for an active infection — when patients who are not isolating can go on to infect others. While testing failures have been a blight on the US response since the beginning of the pandemic, the latest delays reveal a strikingly uneven system that hasn’t been able to scale up to meet spiking demand, hindering efforts to stop the virus’s spread.
To understand what’s behind the disastrous delays in #covid19 test results, it helps to look first at the labs, which are struggling to maintain adequate levels of basic testing supplies, much as they did earlier in the pandemic.
Click HERE for the full story.
Comments