White House advising states to expand COVID-19 testing in prisons, meatpacking plants
The White House is advising state and local leaders to focus their coronavirus testing efforts on nursing homes, prisons, meatpacking plants and other facilities with higher rates of infection to more rapidly contain COVID-19 outbreaks.
Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, told a group of reporters Tuesday that many states are now able to effectively find and test for cases of COVID-19 that are asymptomatic and then use that information to successfully contact trace and contain outbreaks.
“Testing has been expanding at a rate that in several places the governors are saying they need more people to test,” Birx said. “And we are working with them to expand testing to the most vulnerable in nursing homes, test in prisons, test in group housing and test in the most vulnerable and disadvantaged areas of the cities.”
The White House directed states in its reopening plan to focus testing and COVID-19 surveillance efforts on the elderly, as well as low-income areas and communities of color, after medical experts determined that people in assisted living facilities and individuals with underlying health conditions were at higher risk of contracting the contagious disease.
Birx said state, local and federal governments have also been working together to expand testing and contact tracing to communities in which they have found individuals to be especially vulnerable.
“The virus has to start somewhere, so that’s what we’re trying to find county by county, community by community, workplace by workplace,” she said during a Tuesday presentation on state and local data. “It is important to find all the contacts, test and isolate all the cases.”
Major metropolitan areas have seen hospitalizations, fatalities and positive cases “improve significantly” since they expanded testing and contact tracing in vulnerable communities, Birx said. And every state now reports that fewer than 20 percent of the people there who are tested for the coronavirus test positive.
With the exception of Washington, D.C., which is at a “plateau” like Chicago and Los Angeles, major U.S. cities such as Kansas City and Miami have been able to identify and stop potential outbreaks, she said.
“We study these three metros that are closed, and have been closed, to understand where precisely the new cases are coming from and how to prevent new infections,” Birx said.
The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are applying information from the county level to “large metros that are improving and beginning to open” across the country, such as Kansas City, Birx said.
That city is considered by the White House to be a recent success, after officials were able to effectively contain an outbreak in the metro area.
“Many people were so focused on the large metros and really trying to take care of people in a hospital,” Birx said, “but behind all of that, all of this other work was going on in the middle of the country especially the Northwest and Midwest, and others where they were finding isolated outbreaks and containing them working side-by-side with the CDC.”
Ford, Finney and Seward counties in Kansas are in the top 25 counties for the most confirmed cases, based on percentage of the population, the coronavirus data that was shared with reporters showed. But the counties are part of an area in Kansas where outbreaks at meatpacking plants in April caused the number of cases to swell.
Those counties were an exception to the overall decline in COVID-19 cases that has been observed by the CDC.
This story was originally published May 19, 2020 at 8:41 PM with the headline "White House advising states to expand COVID-19 testing in prisons, meatpacking plants."
