Following a summer flood in which coronavirus infections went up, reports from government agencies in recent weeks show signs that the spread of the virus could slow down.
As new infections are reported every day, this month remains slower, as do the average number of coronavirus tests across the state.
Public health experts cannot determine exactly why this decline is happening. But they warn that limited testing is against some of the strongest tactics used to identify and limit the spread of the coronavirus, along with contact training and quarantine.
Testing is essential as Florida students return to school and reopen businesses, Drs. Marissa Levine, a professor of public health and family medicine at the University of South Florida. Knowing where the virus is and preventing clumps from spreading disease is important, she said.
“That to me is the critical infrastructure for managing COVID-19 in communities, and that’s where we need to put all our efforts,” Levine said. “I’m sorry to say here we are in August of this pandemic and we are still as a country not where we need to be with testing.”
Tests in Florida reached a peak in mid-July when the state processed a weekly average of about 100,000 tests a day. Now, just over a month later, that average has dropped to less than 70,000 tests a day, a dip of more than 30 percent from the peak.
Calls and emails to Florida Department of Health officials were not returned this week.
Florida is not an exponent. According to the New York Times, there has been a decline in testing this summer across the country. It is particularly pronounced in states that are leading the summer flood of cases of coronavirus, including Texas and Florida, said Josh Michaud, the global health policy director of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Michaud said understanding why testing is denied requires a bit of speculation. One theory is that public demand for testing has dropped because people were discouraged by long waits, he said.
In June and July, Floridians reported waiting times for swabs at test sites. Some waited almost two weeks to get results back.
“In states where there has been a large turnout, this is where we have seen delayed test results and limited capacity testing,” Michaud said.
The number of people tested at Raymond James Stadium, one of the largest state facilities in the Tampa Bay area, ballooned in late June with more than 1,000 tests collected daily, according to the Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County. But in August, on some days, less than 400 tests were collected.
A lack of supply testing is another barrier many states still face, Michaud said.
While test materials are now much easier to reach than in the spring at the start of the pandemic, facilities are still struggling to secure enough personnel, personal protective equipment and laboratory availability to process COVID-19 tests, Michaud said.
“Given the amount of transmission we have in this country, we have to do millions of tests a day to really get a sense of where we are,” he said. “Capacity constraints still prevent us from getting there.”
March and April mandate mandates were intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus, while states built their capacity to test and sniff out outbreaks, he said. But in many cases, states opened up too quickly.
“At the national and state levels, we are in most cases still hindered,” Michaud said.
The positive percentage, as well as the percentage of positive results among all processed tests, can be a useful indicator to understand if there are enough tests going on in a community, said Drs. Thomas Tsai, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
The Harvard Global Health Institute first estimated that communities have a positive rate of about 10 percent for delaying the virus, and have a rate of 3 percent or lower for eradication.
But Tsai said positivity can be confusing to understand, even for experts. More types of COVID-19 tests are constantly being approved and each state follows and compiles data differently.
“The test was never an end in itself,” Tsai said. “You do not get a gold star to test a lot. You get a gold star for suppressing a number of cases. ”
The strategy of how best to test continues to evolve as more experts learn about the virus, Tsai said. There is a lot of emphasis on the sensitivity of tests, but to perform widespread tests, it may be better to rely on less sensitive, cheaper rapid tests that give faster results and can be used more often, he said. hy. Some areas of the country still do not use such types of tests.
There should also be better availability of test facilities for hotspot areas with higher demand, Tsai said.
In late August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its coronavirus testing guidelines to say that people without coronavirus symptoms do not need testing, even if they have been exposed to a known case, according to the New York Times. Experts warned that limiting tests like this, to cut out potentially asymptomatic cases, could make things worse and increase the spread.
Although testing has declined, Tsai said he believes the transmission of disease is actually slowing down, and it’s not just because fewer tests are being done.
Other ways to control the spread of the pandemic without widespread testing are dramatic, and would require strict lock-in periods, as seen in cities such as Melbourne, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, the latter closing down completely after the detection of 29 cases of coronavirus.
But in the US, the hope was always to test layers with contact trace and quarantine practices to control spread of disease.
‘That was always the goal, to gain control over the field so that they were not just individual fires. It’s glitches that can be spotted and spread very quickly, ‘said Tsai. “The good and bad news is that we can control this.”
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