Testing was first confined to public health laboratories and hard to access, similar to the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The CDC last month began pushing out tests to five commercial labs to increase capacity, including Labcorp, which last week said it will start processing samples.
The U.S. also is vaccinating people with confirmed cases and their immediate contacts. But shots were slow to arrive, and the FDA took nearly two months to approve the release of 1.1 million doses that were in storage in Denmark, according to New York magazine.
HHS last week said it’s making an additional 144,000 doses of Bavarian Nordic’s JYNNEOS vaccine available to states and other jurisdictions, on top of the 20,000 doses that have already been sent to 15 states and cities.
Even with vaccines and testing, public health departments are facing a familiar scenario and need to investigate cases, isolate people confirmed to be ill and deploy effective contact tracing to get control of a virus that’s spreading widely.
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