Forty percent of U.S. Covid-19 tests come back too late to be clinically meaningful, data show – By Meg Tirrell, Nick Wells & Leanne Miller (CNBC) / Aug 15 2020
- CNBC and Dynata ran a survey of more than 9,400 Americans in all 50 states to get a sense of testing turnaround times for Covid-19.
- Experts say results need to be returned in less than three days, optimally two, to be clinically meaningful.
- The results showed almost 40% of tests take longer than that.
In early July, Shannon Mayer started to feel a sudden tightness in her chest.
“The next day it was really hard to breathe,” the 31-year-old Chicago resident told CNBC. “I got scared.”
Mayer has asthma, but says she hadn’t had an issue with it for years. So she decided to get a test for Covid-19. The results, she was told, would take five to 10 days, and she was instructed to quarantine while she waited. After a week, the results still hadn’t been returned. And Mayer already felt better and suspected she wasn’t infected, so she stopped quarantining.
“Had I stuck with it, I would have been in my house for three weeks,” she said. She was tested July 1, and her results didn’t come back until July 24. Luckily, she was negative. Mayer’s not alone. Bethany Silva, who lives in New York City, reported a 13-day wait for her results. For Lisa Miller, in New Jersey, it was a week.
Continue to article: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/15/forty-percent-of-us-covid-19-tests-come-back-too-late-to-be-clinically-meaningful-data-show.html
