WASHINGTON _ The Trump administration is partnering with private labs and cutting red tape for the rapid mass production of COVID-19 tests amid fears that containment of the coronavirus is no longer attainable in some of the nation's largest population areas.
From Seattle to New York City, local officials have pleaded not only for more testing kits, but for improved ones that can provide results within hours over days.
At a press conference at the White House on Friday, Trump said the introduction of large-scale commercial laboratory work would bring 1.4 million tests on board next week, and 5 million within a month, in addition to over 1 million already out in the field.
"I doubt we'll need anywhere near that," Trump said, announcing a national emergency to combat the pandemic.
Governors in the worst-affected states, including New York, California and Washington state, have lamented the pace in both the delivery and the processing of tests.
On March 3, "seeing the spread of the virus around the globe," Trump called executives from the nation's top private laboratories for what became the first in a series of meetings, said Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator in the White House.
"The president realized that our current approach to testing was inadequate to meet the needs of the American public," Birx acknowledged at the press conference.
Trump, asked whether he saw the test supply shortage as a failure of his administration, responded, "I don't take responsibility at all."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently requires doctors and hospitals to provide their own chemical compounds, and to ship test samples out to a public health laboratory for processing, demanding time and resources from health care workers that have become increasingly sparse as the pandemic has worsened.
The first tests dispatched by the CDC in early February also included a flawed ingredient that produced inconclusive testing results, forcing a bottleneck of testing at its processing center in Georgia.
Updated testing kits have corrected the error, and a change in CDC and FDA guidelines has directed health care workers to use less testing material than before on each patient, doubling the use of the kits.
"It is a failing. Let's admit it," Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told lawmakers of the pace of national testing on Thursday.
The coronavirus was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization this week.
The administration has since turned to private sector labs, both large and small, that can increase the mass distribution of tests.
LabCorp and Quest Diagnostic, which were hosted at the White House on Friday, are now manufacturing tests on a greater scale than the CDC would be able to do on its own. That was made possible after the Food and Drug Administration, with emergency authorities, cleared the private labs' production within a breakneck 24 hours.
Those tests will be processed more efficiently � private health labs can process exponentially more tests at once than public ones. They will still take a day or more to produce results and they are still not the "spot tests" that other nations have that can be conducted in a doctor's office or a hospital, start to finish, within a matter of hours.
Birx said that spot tests are the next step, as the Department of Health and Human Services cleared on Friday $1.3 million in federal support for the development of two potential rapid-response coronavirus tests that could be performed in an hour.
Before those tests are ready, the White House coronavirus task force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, is focusing on ramping up laboratory testing.
Shipments of LabCorp and Quest tests have steadily increased since March 5 "particularly to the outbreak areas of Washington State and California," Birx said, and will become increasingly available nationwide as the coronavirus reaches every corner of the nation.
As of Friday, 1,953 Americans have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, across 46 states, and 50 have died.
Inspired by South Korea, which has become a model for successful testing worldwide after wrestling control of one of the worst outbreaks, the administration plans to expand drive-through testing in the most critically affected regions of the country.
The tactic has already been deployed in the community of New Rochelle, New York, where the governor has enforced a containment zone amid an acute outbreak there. Officials hope the drive-through testing method will protect patients from potentially exposing themselves or others to the disease in doctors' offices, and lift some of the burden from hospitals already bracing for a flood of infected patients.
The administration has also tapped Google to produce an online tool that will walk Americans through whether their symptoms warrant a test and, if so, where they could conveniently get one performed.
"We're announcing a new partnership with the private sector to vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus," Trump said.
"We want to make sure that those who need a test can get a test very safely, quickly and conveniently, but we don't want people to take a test if they feel they shouldn't be doing it," he said.
First asked whether he would receive a test himself, Trump demurred, pointing out that federal guidance to U.S. citizens is to avoid testing unless there is good cause for it.
That instruction, from members of his coronavirus task force, has been motivated by experts seeking to preserve testing kits.
Asked a second time whether, having interacted with an individual who had tested positive for COVID-19, he planned to get tested, Trump for the first time publicly said: "Most likely."
