A woman wears a mask on Wall St. near the New York Stock Exchange in New York, U.S., February 28, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermidNEW YORK: New York health officials are trying to get their own coronavirus testing kits up and running after getting stuck with faulty tests from the federal government that they said left them unable to diagnose people quickly in the nation's most populous city.
The weeks-long struggle to expand local testing has been criticized as an early misstep in the response by US President Donald Trump's administration to the outbreak. There are 63 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus in the United States, most of whom fell sick while abroad then were repatriated. No cases have been detected in New York City, but Mayor Bill de Blasio and health officials have said its arrival here is inevitable.Health officials in New York, impatient with the wait for replacement kits to be sent out, copied the CDC protocol in developing their own test kits.
But in New York, both the state lab and the New York City lab said that in their kits the N1 component was also flawed, and that the workaround proposed by the CDC and FDA was of no use."That was unacceptable to New York," said Scott Becker, chief executive officer of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local public health labs."A handful of labs had this issue. It wasn't very many.