Illinois still short of COVID-19 testing goal of 10,000 people a day — and even that might be less than what’s needed

More than three weeks after Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the state needed to process 10,000 coronavirus tests each day to get ahead of the outbreak gripping Illinois, average daily testing numbers are still 40 percent short of that goal.

While Pritzker and the federal government say the state now has the machines needed to conduct thousands of more tests, a shortage in necessary supplies to actually process those tests has limited how many can actually be completed, officials say.

What’s more, some national projections adjusted for Illinois’ population suggest the state may need to process roughly 15,000 to 900,000 tests a day to be able to confidently chart the next steps toward returning to normal. Some experts say more tests are needed to screen individuals without symptoms who could unwittingly spread the disease and check people who are considered high-risk multiple times.

“We will never, ever get out of the stay-at-home order unless we do massive amounts of testing of those people at highest risk for COVID-19,” said Dr. Howard Ehrman, a former deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health. “If Pritzker takes us out of the stay-at-home order before enough testing is done, either partially or completely, then thousands of more people will get infected and die.”

Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of Northwestern University’s Institute of Global Health, agrees that it’s vital to ramp up testing to understand the true reach of the virus, isolate those who are infected, enable public health workers to trace the contacts of those who have been infected and ultimately get Americans back to work.

“Anybody should be able to be tested,” said Murphy.

However, he acknowledged the state — and nation — are a long way from being able to do that.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times file

Goal set weeks ago

On March 29, Pritzker told reporters that he hoped the state would scale its testing capacity from roughly 4,000 tests a day at the time to the elusive 10,000 mark in just 10 days, or by April 9.

But since that deadline — a period in which Pritzker updated the state’s criteria for testing to include anyone with symptoms and additional sites started testing — an average of only 6,149 daily tests were reported. Nearly 8,600 tests were done on April 12, the most on any single day, but the number has dropped again, including on Tuesday when 6,639 tests had been processed in the previous 24 hours.

“There isn’t enough testing and there won’t be for some time to really open everything up,” Pritzker said during his daily press briefing. “And the fact that we’re going to need a whole lot more means we have to leave things still in a place that seems not normal to everybody and won’t be for some time.”

Illinois isn’t the only state struggling to run more tests, though. The lack of widespread testing has remained a critical issue since COVID-19 was first detected in the U.S. in January, and failures on the federal level appear to have set the country back as the deadly virus took hold.

Considerable steps have since been taken to bolster the country’s testing capacity: New diagnostic tests have been rolled out, more testing sites have cropped up and major commercial labs are now processing results.

Supply shortage

But whether having more capacity is enough to boost the actual number of tests taken and processed is another question.

President Donald Trump continues to spar with several governors as his administration insists that states aren’t utilizing their entire testing capacity based on the number of testing machines at hospitals and labs. Illinois, for example, has enough machines to run 16,000 to 30,000 tests a day, the federal government said in documents released Monday.

Pritzker pushed back, noting that states require more swabs to take samples from people, and more materials to transport those samples to labs and process them. He has not made a new estimate on when the state could reach the 10,000-test threshold.

Murphy said making sure the states have enough supplies to increase testing is “obviously a federal thing. ... The supply chain involves multiple states and even multiple countries, so who can coordinate that?”

10,000 not enough?

Even once the state gets to 10,000 tests a day, that isn’t enough to truly return things to normal, some experts said.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C., is calling for 371,000 daily tests, while former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottleib holds that 430,000 coronavirus tests should be processed each day, according to a report released Friday by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. Meanwhile, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer believes half the country should get tested each week, amounting to 23 million tests a day.

Adjusting those models for Illinois’ population of 12.67 million, or roughly 3.9% of the national populace, the state would have to process between 14,469 and 897,000 tests each day.

“There is not yet consensus over what approach to testing is required for social distancing measures to be loosened, or exactly how much capacity is needed,” the Kaiser report stated. “But, by any measure, it is clear that we are far from being able to do enough tests to enable us to move to the next phase of responding to the pandemic in states across the country.”