Virus hot spots clamor for Abbott's quick tests

As Abbott Laboratories began shipping its new rapid-response tests across the country Wednesday, a new flashpoint emerged in the nation's handling of the pandemic: where to ship the COVID-19 diagnostics that could be one of the most effective tools in combating the outbreak.

Some White House officials want to ship many of the tests, which were approved last week and can deliver results in five to 13 minutes, to areas where there are fewer cases, such as rural areas and parts of the South. But officials in hard-hit areas and some public health experts favor directing them to the outbreak's current hot spots, arguing that delays in test readings have sidelined many first responders and health care workers and made it harder to isolate the most contagious patients.

During a Tuesday meeting of the White House coronavirus task force in the Situation Room, Vice President Mike Pence and other officials discussed diverting new tests to areas where there are relatively few cases, according to two individuals familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

They said the administration needs "to figure out the spread in places where we don't quite understand it now," according to one of the individuals present. The final consensus seemed to be, "Let's send it to the South and low-density areas."

The lag in delivering test results is taking a toll on communities across the country, depriving them of workers who can respond to medical emergencies and sowing uncertainty among hospital officials deciding what precautions to take. The competition for machines is so intense that governors and mayors have begun personally calling Abbott executives to negotiate orders.

In beleaguered Detroit, which now has one of the nation's highest rates of infection and one of the fastest-rising death tolls, Mayor Mike Duggan said Wednesday that he secured the cellphone number of Miles White - the chairman and outgoing chief executive of Abbott Labs - and woke him up Sunday morning to beg for the test, because he knew the whole country would be calling. He said the fact that he struck a deal for five machines and 5,000 kits would be a "game changer," allowing firefighters, police and nurses to get back on the job and out of quarantine.

Abbott spokesman John Koval, whose firm started shipping 50,000 tests per day on Wednesday, said, "We're working with the administration to deploy them where they will have the greatest impact." He would not elaborate, but said states across the country had already begun to receive and use them.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said in an interview that his state needs at least 100,000 more tests than it has.

"We've talked to Abbott. They're shortly supposed to have a small amount of testing machines out to the states. No governor in America has received any yet," Hogan said. "They've said they are available. They are not yet available. They say, 'Get on the phone, governors can get all these things.' I just got off the phone with all the governors, no governors have these things."

Public health experts say tests are needed everywhere - as much as several hundred thousand a day. "Hot zones need them the most," said Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University's medical school and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, "but everyone needs them."

Even though widely used test analyses take four hours, shortages of the large costly machines used for those analyses have caused bottlenecks, forcing patients to wait four or more days for test results.

There are now more than a dozen major players in the testing world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has its own labs, but on Feb. 29 it appealed to hospitals and private companies for help. Since then, private companies have churned out as many as 84,000 tests daily, and have accounted for about three-quarters of the 1,064,506 tests completed as of April 1.

The biggest companies that have jumped into covid-19 testing include Roche, Labcorp, and Quest, established names in laboratory analysis. They have ramped up quickly.

For primary care physicians, Abbott's technology is largely out of reach. Gary Bergman, senior physician at Children's Medical Associates of Northern Virginia, said in a phone interview Wednesday that he and his partners looked into buying one of the firm's machines, but it would cost between $12,000 and $15,000, and they couldn't say how many covid-19 tests they could supply or what they would cost.

"It doesn't pay. It's not practical," said Bergman, who continue to see sick children and newborns even though business has dipped by two-thirds.