Newsom Critical Of Numbers Being Tested For Coronavirus; ‘I Own That’ Slowness
SACRAMENTO (CBS SF)
Gov. Gavin Newsom was critical of the low numbers of Californians who have been tested for the coronavirus and he placed blame for the slow rollout of testing squarely on his own shoulders in a Saturday address to the state.
Newsom said, so far, 126,700 Californians had been tested for the virus.
“That testing number may sound high to some,” he said. “It is low to many others and certainly to me. Let me just acknowledge on the outset — the testing space has been a challenge for us and I own that. It has been my responsibility as governor to do better.”
The governor acknowledged that, over recent weeks, there was a period when the backlog of those awaiting results grew by 59,500 people, many of them waiting in fear and anxiety for as long as 12 days. Currently, Newsom said, there were 13,000 awaiting their results as of Saturday.
“All of that has frustrated you and it has frustrated me,” he said.
Newsom announced he has brought together a cross section of leaders on the front lines of the testing battle, assembling a new task force and hammering out a new plan of attack. The goal is to increase by five-fold the number of tests given daily over “course of the next few weeks.”
“We are now in a position where I can confidently say it’s a new day and we are turning a page on our old approach to how we coordinate, how we collaborate, how we organize,” the governor said.
“I don’t want to get numerical [on the new testing levels] until I can be sure that this new promise can materialize,” Newsom said.
The governor announced new testing partnerships with UC Davis and UC San Diego to create a network of 5- to 7 hubs statewide “where we have high throughput, where we will work with different vendors — not be prescriptive on the exact type of testing but work with these hubs to significantly increase our testing capacity … They will be geographically-based, all up and down the state of California.”
Newsom also lauded Stanford Medicine for being the first in the state to develop a serum test for the virus and announced more point-of-care testing like the one from Abbott Labs that was deployed by Dignity Health in its Bay Area urgent care clinic this week.
“These are tests where we can get results back in as early as 5 minutes (the Abbott test),” he said. “Abbott Laboratory is now committed to 75 testing sites in the state of California working with 13 of our hospital systems.”
There have been 12,026 positive tests in the state and 282 deaths. Meanwhile, on the Central Coast as of early Saturday, there have been 139 positive results and 5 deaths with Santa Cruz County being one of the hardest hit with 59 confirmed cases and 1 death, while Monterey County has registered 57 confirmed cases and 2 deaths with 8 people who have recovered.
