Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Monday morning the state of Florida has completed 50,000 coronavirus tests, mostly in the past two weeks.
Contrast that with the 330,000 calls that came in just six hours on Monday from people seeking tests at the new Palm Beach County site, and it quickly becomes apparent that the demand for testing far outstrips the supply, and the supply, say experts, needs to grow by a lot.
Testing capacity has grown. Up to March 15, the state was completing only about 200 tests for the new coronavirus a day. By March 30, that number was closer to 7,000 tests per day, according to data from the Florida Department of Health.
But only .2% of Florida’s almost 22 million residents have been tested for a virus that, according to DeSantis, may have been present in Miami as early as the Super Bowl on Feb. 2.
One problem, says Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, a professor of epidemiology at Florida International University, is that Florida has had to limit who it tests because of the scarcity of the diagnostic. Only symptomatic people who have with someone with a confirmed case, those with a history of travel, and those who’ve been hospitalized are likely to receive the tests, she said.
“The problem is if you have a close contact and you don’t have symptoms, you don’t meet the criteria,” she says, pointing out that the state is missing out on finding many asymptomatic cases.
“The next step would be to expand it to close contacts without symptoms,” she says.
But even as the state tries to rapidly expand its testing capacity, it is unclear when that expansion will come.
As medical personnel swabbed driver after driver to the governor’s left on Monday morning while he spoke in front of the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, DeSantis announced that he was sending 1,750 rapid coronavirus test kits to Memorial Hospital in Broward County, and another unspecified number to Jacksonville. The test kits are capable of returning results in 45 minutes.
The governor also said that the state was trying to acquire a test that returned results in 5 minutes, and which, if developed and deployed, could screen first responders for the disease more effectively. The tests, developed by Abott Laboratories, are run on a small, portable and lightweight platform and were approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The company intends to quickly ramp up production of the testing units to 50,000 a day, according to their news release.
Currently, tests for the virus can take up to 5-8 days to be processed, unless a test site has its own lab.
Later Monday, at a news conference in West Palm Beach announcing the opening of a new drive-thru test site in Palm Beach County’s Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, Florida Division of Emergency management Director Jared Moskowitz said that, though it continues to look for test kits, the state had received 15,000 in the past month, and expected to receive another 5,000 Tuesday.
A second testing site is expected to open in southern Palm Beach County later this week, says state Rep. Emily Slosberg, though it is unclear where that site will be located.
South Florida has accounted for the bulk of the diagnostics, completing 23,448 tests, according to data from the State Department of Health. But that same data shows that one-third of the counties in the state have had fewer than 100 tests completed.
And of the populous counties in the state, Palm Beach County still lags in tests per person.
“If we had as many tests done as New York’s had done,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott said on the Brian Kilmeade Fox Radio show on Monday, “We’d probably have 30,000 to 40,000 cases right now.”
New York state has completed more than 186,400 coronavirus tests.
Anything but a major expansion in testing capacity is unlikely to be enough, according to Trepka. “It would take an awful lot more testing to get a complete picture of what’s going on,” she says. And that’s a problem because, without a robust testing regime, “we can’t safely stop social distancing.”
Mario Ariza can be reached at mariza@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4233.
NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the percentage of Florida’s residents who have been tested for the new coronavirus..
