Illinois Still Short Of Coronavirus Testing Goal, Pritzker Admits

CHICAGO — Illinois is falling far short of conducting the number of coronavirus tests needed to understand the level of COVID-19 infections in the state, Gov. JB Pritzker said Wednesday. Scientists and experts say the state needs to conduct 10,000 tests a day to get an accurate picture of coronavirus cases, but the state has only just surpassed a rate of 6,000 tests a day, according to the governor.

Pritzker, who had set a goal 10 days earlier of ramping up testing to the required rate, said the state acquired five testing machines from laboratory equipment company Thermo Fisher Scientific and distributed them to the state's three testing labs. The machines were supposed to be able to run 200 tests an hour, potentially increasing the state's capacity by thousands of tests a day.

"Over the past 10 days, working alongside experts from Thermo Fisher, we are still not getting the level of output that we want to see from these machines," Pritzker said. "More importantly these tests are not producing valid results in a way that meets our exacting standards. I am as impatient as the rest of you are, wanting to increase testing, but I will not sacrifice accuracy for the sake of speed."

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Illinois also ran into problems getting the approximately 3,000 rapid Abbott Labs tests a day promised by the North Chicago-based company's leadership, Pritzker said.

"Unfortunately, it is our understanding now that the federal government redirected most of these early tests to private systems without our state input about where these tests would make the most impact," the governor said. "That said, we believe this new test capacity will begin to show up in our numbers as soon as these labs start to utilize their full capacity."

Pritzker said the federal government gave Illinois 15 of the machines required to run the rapid tests, which could be hugely helpful, but they came with only eight tests per machine for the entire state.

"I lay out these obstacles not to complain or to point fingers but to be fully transparent with all of you as to the challenges that we face and how we are working to overcome them. It's on us," the governor said. "I am also hopeful that this transparency will shine a light on some of what's taking place across the country and will encourage the White House to remove the obstacles that are blocking our path forward and to work together."

Every day that state labs do not have enough coronavirus tests delays answers about the extent of the virus in the state, Pritzker said.

"Today I'm standing in front of you and saying we are not there yet," he said.

The governor said the alternative of using federal labs would mean patients would have to wait a week to 10 days for results, as opposed to learning their status within two days with state labs.

"The buck stops with me and we are still not where we need to be on the testing front," Pritzker said.

The update of how the state has failed to meet the governor's testing goal came as public health officials reported the state's highest number of coronavirus deaths within a 24-hour period for the second consecutive day.

Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said an additional 1,529 cases of COVID-19 were detected and 82 more people in the state had died from complications of the virus the prior day. More than 15,000 coronavirus infections have been confirmed in Illinois, and 462 people have died as of Wednesday.

"These are our highest numbers to date, and although the numbers are still increasing, I will tell you that the rate at which they're increasing is less, and that is a good sign," Ezike said. "We are not seeing the exponential growth as we were seeing before. But even as there may be some glimmers of hope I say that physical distancing must continue to be the way that we reduce the spread of this virus."

Ezike said testing for coronavirus antibodies that would confirm that people had recovered from COVID-19. It is possible, though not certain, such antibodies could confer immunity from a repeated coronavirus infection, thought the director emphasized scientists do not yet know all the details about the new virus.

"We are hoping that we are getting close to either the peak or the plateau, it's not clear yet how long that would be," Ezike said. Though it is impossible to predict with certainty how many days remain until the state's peak, she said, "we think we're heading in that direction."

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