Thursday, July 23, 2020

US labs buckle amid testing surge; world virus cases top 15M

Two women and a child wait to take a Coronavirus test at a mobile testing site at the Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science Wednesday, July 22, 2020, in Los Angeles. California's confirmed coronavirus cases have topped 409,000, surpassing New York for most in the nation. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laboratories across the U.S. are buckling under a surge of coronavirus tests, creating long processing delays that experts say are undercutting the pandemic response.
With the U.S. tally of confirmed infections at nearly 4 million Wednesday and new cases surging, the bottlenecks are creating problems for workers kept off the job while awaiting results, nursing homes struggling to keep the virus out and for the labs themselves as they deal with a crushing workload.
Some labs are taking weeks to return COVID-19 results, exacerbating fears that people without symptoms could be spreading the virus if they don’t isolate while they wait.

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