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Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday that, with the exception of a few places, the United States is seeing strong drops in COVID-19-related hospitalization and mortality rates, attributing the “vast majority” of new cases to a surge in testing. Speaking at a White House roundtable, Pence said that increased cases of COVID-19 infections in some states were caused by a “dramatic increase in testing.” “Our team has been working with governors over the past week. We’re carefully analyzing those new cases, and we really believe that the vast majority of new cases is a reflection, as you said, of...

Over the two last weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and others have voiced concerns that packed police brutality protests across the city could trigger a new wave of COVID-19 infections. Whether or not that’s the case, however, remains unknown — and de Blasio’s team won’t be directly trying to find out. The hundreds of contact tracing workers hired by the city under de Blasio’s new “test and trace” campaign have been instructed not to ask anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19 whether they recently attended a demonstration, City Hall confirmed to THE CITY. “No person will be asked proactively if...

For the second time in about a month, Washington state leaders have completely changed how they track and report key metrics in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Two weeks ago, as we noted, the previous dashboard with five dials proved to be largely useless, inaccurate, and irrelevant. Soon afterward, state officials stopped updating the dials and now they have abandoned them entirely. The new dashboard the governor has put up is, potentially, an improvement. For example, where his old dashboard with the dials claimed daily testing for COVID-19 was improving, saying the amount of testing was “very roughly steady,” his new...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted Thursday that she has not been tested for coronavirus, nor has she been tested for antibodies to determine if she had previously been infected. Pelosi was asked about her testing status during a weekly press briefing, during which she espoused the significance of widespread testing in helping get the pandemic under control, after 1.7 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 100,000 have died. "There has to be a stop to this. The answer is testing," Pelosi said. "We have in our HEROES Act a plan for testing. Testing to open up...

TOPLINE In updated guidance posted on its website over the weekend, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged an inability to accurately determine if individuals had been infected with Covid-19 via antibody tests; if the test is used in a population where prevalence is low, it's possible that "less than half of those testing positive will truly have antibodies."

Earlier this month, Chinese authorities announced plans to test all 11 million people in Wuhan within ten days, a plan they referred to as “ten days of mass battle.” This was prompted by the discovery of a half dozen new cases of the virus in one apartment building. In the end they didn’t quite get it done in ten days. They did however test about 9 million people using a technique called sample pooling: Most of those nine million samples have already been processed, according to a daily record of nucleic-acid tests by Wuhan health authorities. In total, they...

According to a NYU study, the legendary five-minute Abbott coronavirus test misses close to 50 percent of positive infections. Abbott disputes this. The company claims its own false negatives are just .02 percent and it is not convinced NYU did the tests correctly. ... This test is the one currently in use at the White House and the one President Trump touts as the five-minute test because it can produce a positive result in five to 13 minutes, and a negative result in 13 minutes.

March 31, 2020 San Diego, CA (March 31, 2020) – Cue Health Inc. (“Cue”), a healthcare technology company, announced that is has been awarded a $13 million contract to accelerate the development, validation and FDA clearance of a portable, molecular diagnostic test capable of detecting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in less than 25 minutes using a simple nasal swab. The test is part of the Cue Health Monitoring System, which is designed to be a portable device that can perform a molecular test and connect patients to a mobile health platform that features interventional components such as telemedicine...

Gov. Janet Mills has continued to lift lockdown measures that have slowed the pandemic in Maine even though the state has failed to meet key reopening prerequisites and other essential benchmarks and guidelines established by public health experts. The missed targets include downward trends in new cases, minimum levels of daily tests performed, and the establishment of a regime to routinely test asymptomatic individuals in exposed roles such as health care providers, supermarket clerks, ambulance crews and factory employees. “If we are really going to bring our society back to normal and have a major reopening, we need to be...

The White House official in charge of coordinating the administration’s efforts to corral medical equipment in the fight against the coronavirus on Sunday blasted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for dropping the ball on early testing. “Early on in this virus, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back,” Peter Navarro, the coordinator for the Defense Production Act, said Sunday on...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted a coronavirus testing program promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and Seattle health officials pending reviews. The program sought to send test kits to the homes of people both healthy and sick to try to bring the country to the level of testing officials say is necessary before states can begin safely reopening. The program, which had already gone through thousands of tests, found dozens of cases that had been previously undiagnosed. The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) said on its website that the FDA had asked it to pause testing while it receives...

Abbott Laboratories is rolling out a new test that can tell whether people have had the novel coronavirus. The test detects antibodies that your body creates to fight off the virus, and Abbott said it'll be able to ship almost 1 million of the tests this week, according to a company announcement. They'll be shipped to laboratories across the country and used with Abbott equipment many of them already possess, according to the company. The machines can run 100-200 tests per hour. Abbott said it plans to be able to produce 4 million tests in April and 20 million in...

Antibody testing not available to the general public.

  James S. Brady Press Briefing Room   2:17 P.M. EDT  MS. MCENANY:  Hello, everyone.  I want to highlight three critical aspects of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus that have exceeded the media’s expectations and should inspire confidence in every American across this country.  Rest assured the Trump administration is working tirelessly to defeat the invisible enemy.First, contrary to some media pronouncements, the United States did not need the 1 million ventilators thus far that the media said we were in dire need of.  In fact, it’s encouraging to be able to say that every single American who has...

Rose Garden   4:15 P.M. EDT  THE PRESIDENT:  We’re here today to provide an update on the unprecedented testing capacity developed by the United States — the most advanced and robust testing system anywhere in the world, by far.  This afternoon, I’ll also announce new steps that we’re taking to make tests even more widely available.To battle a virus, my administration marshaled every resource at our nation’s disposal: public, private, military, economic, scientific, and industrial — all at your disposal.  We launched the largest manufacturing ramp-up since the Second World War.  There’s been nothing like it since.At the center...

116th CONGRESS 2d Session H. R. 6666 To authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID–19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES May 1, 2020 Mr. Rush (for himself, Ms. Barragán, Ms. Bass, Mr. Beyer, Mr. Brown of Maryland, Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Cárdenas, Mr. Carson of Indiana, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Correa, Mr. Cuellar, Ms. DeGette, Mrs. Demings, Mr. Gonzalez of Texas, Mr. Grijalva, Mr. Hastings, Mrs. Hayes, Mr....

Last month, South Korean scientists made a very disturbing discovery. About 15 percent of patients who had recovered from the coronavirus was testing positive again. The same worrying phenomenon was discovered in China as well. The implications were disheartening. It meant that a large percentage of people may never become immune from the coronavirus, making an effective vaccine very difficult to create.But South Korean scientists kept investigating and have now found that it’s likely what the testing of coronavirus patients was detecting were “non-infectious” pieces of the virus that were causing the tests to register positive.South Korea uses a very...

Democrats have introduced a bill that would grant the government and other “entities” the authority to enter your home to conduct coronavirus testing, and even to remove Americans from their homes. House Resolution 6666, introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) last week, would authorize the “Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID–19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes.” In other words, the government or other “eligible entities” will be authorized to conduct testing in...

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room 4:32 P.M. EDT MS. MCENANY: Good afternoon, everyone. I’d like to direct your attention to a very encouraging graph regarding test results. It’ll be over my shoulder and hopefully on the screen for those of you watching on television. As this chart shows, the United States has, to date, completed 7.5 million coronavirus tests. It’s an extraordinary number. And, as you can see, the United States leads the world in testing. This graph is no accident. In fact, this graph is a testament to American innovation, including the work of the Trump administration. For...

Many governments and academics around the world are calling for widespread or even universal testing for SARS-CoV-2, "the coronavirus."   Before endorsing, it's worthwhile becoming familiar with the clever stratagem of eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.   It wouldn't be the first time his calculations will have come in handy: Alan Turing used Bayesian probabilities to help crack the Nazi Enigma Code. Reverend Bayes died without knowing the value his statistical speculation would bring to the world — but people, examining posthumous notebooks, realized he'd discovered a fascinating trick of statistics.   Simply put, he calculated that the likelihood of an outcome's...