RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — When asked about the coronavirus in the health care facility where he works, Tim Wellington remembers one story in particular: When one family came in, member by member, and each passed away in the course of a few weeks.
“This disease is a family killer,” said Wellington, a pseudonym used because they feared reprisal. “One person will be symptomatic before the others.”
“If they had had access to testing, who knows what could have happened,” he added.
Testing in Virginia has long been the Achilles heel for the state. While the total number of deaths and infections is nowhere near as high as some others, outbreaks, especially in assisted living and low income communities, have become a staple.
And testing continues to leave a black mark on Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, the nation’s only medical doctor in an executive chair, as the state hovers in the bottom 10 nationwide for testing.
Northam live streams press conferences three times a week, and he’s used these opportunities to communicate with the public about his preference for a “data driven” approach to addressing the virus and slowly reopening the state. Among those early benchmarks for reopening was 10,000 tests a day.
But numbers from the Virginia Department of Health show the state is nowhere near that — Wednesday, the most recent day with numbers available, had only about 4,500 tests reported — despite many areas being allowed to reopen last Friday.
“The number of tests we’re performing depends on the day,” Northam said at Monday’s briefing. “We’re ramping testing up specifically in areas that have at-risk areas.”
The increased testing in higher risk areas did happen. Tuesday morning, according to Delegate Danica Roem (D-13), there was a seemingly endless line of cars queued up at a local high school turned testing facility near her District.
“The line was so long I didn’t even attempt to go onto the campus,” she said. Her district lies in the western parts of the D.C. suburbs. Often referred to as Northern Virginia, her region as well as the counties to the east often make up the lion’s share of positive cases as test results come in the highly populated and racially and economically diverse area.
While the state struggles to catch up to testing demand, she said she was glad to see the testing sites open that day, as well as the free price tag.
“[There’s a] huge amount of demand for free testing and there’s not nearly enough supply and frankly what we have now should have been in place two months ago,” said Roem.
Dr. Amy Mathers, an infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia Medical Center, is also championing testing in areas like Roem’s. As a member of Northam’s Testing Advisory Board, she’s had some insight into what’s gone wrong and right — though mostly wrong — with the state’s testing system.
She said her hospital took in the first Covid-19 tests on March 10, but they were working with commercial labs at the time. Her team developed their own test — a complex process involving FDA and CDC approval — and they began testing on their own by the end of the month.
But even that wasn’t enough. Mathers said their testing system relied on a machine purchased by Cepheid, a California-based testing company, which was able to test up to 1,000 kits a day. But the resources they were allocated by the company — swabs, chemical agents and the like — was enough for only 150 tests a day.
“A lot of labs and hospitals happen to rely on the Cepheid kits and those have been especially hard to obtain,” Mathers said. “Other states have more supplies cause they’re using a different commercial platform.”