Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

5 big travel lessons from an accomplished conservationist

Cruise ship drags dead whale into New York, prompting investigation

The case for eating at Italian gas stations

‘Bunker mentality’ at Columbia lit protest spark that spread nationwide

A mystery illness stole their kids’ personalities. These moms fought for answers.

The greatness — yes, greatness — of the Planet of the Apes

Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic

Claire Messud turns her family’s history into a masterpiece

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

An unexpected sight to behold: Ted Cruz working bipartisan deals

Narrative of Trump snoozing in court takes hold — much to his annoyance

Manafort will no longer take on Republican convention role

Courtroom photo ban adds to hurdles for Trump trial journalists

Israel’s shameful ban on Al Jazeera

Checks, not sex, and other takeaways from Trump’s New York hush money trial

Carolyn Hax: Keep scrolling seven hours per day, or give therapy a try?

Ask Amy: Mother isn’t accepting of her gay son

Ask Amy: What do I say about my former walking buddy who yelled at me?

Fooled by AI? These firms sell deepfake detection that’s ‘REAL 100%.’ 

Apple apologizes for iPad ad after blowback 

Google’s new ‘Find My’ device network is useful but a stalking risk

Bishop vanished. His species can still be saved.

VCU grads walk out during Gov. Youngkin’s speech

Northern lights glow worldwide

The urgent air defense lessons of April 16 

Are smartphones destroying childhood? It’s complicated.

In the campaign against Donald Trump, do the ends justify the means?

Eighth-inning decision burns the Nats in a 4-2 loss to the Red Sox

Nats win opener at Fenway behind Patrick Corbin and a lockdown bullpen

Commanders rookie DT Johnny Newton needs a second foot surgery

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Photos of his mom at lunch are a balm people didn’t know they needed

Dog hit by car loses leg, is adopted by firefighter who helped her

Tens of thousands in Georgia protest Russian-style ‘foreign agents’ law

Israeli operations in north and south Gaza force displaced to flee again

‘Nothing left’: At least 300 dead as flash floods devastate Afghanistan

US-POLITICS-BIDEN

Health

Well+Being

Opinions

Higher Education

Education

https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

Coronavirus pandemic

When Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/marylands-rock-star-first-lady-delivers-on-virus-tests/2020/04/22/93e1e1a0-84c4-11ea-81a3-9690c9881111_story.html" target="_blank">announced the purchase of</a> 500,000 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> tests from South Korea last week, he called it “an exponential, game-changing step forward” in the state’s effort to get more people tested.

The dramatic story drew notice from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/04/21/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia-live-updates/" target="_blank" title="www.washingtonpost.com">dismissive swipe</a> from fellow Republican President Trump.

But more than 10 days after the chartered Korean Air plane landed, Maryland has not allowed access to the tests kits, much to the frustration of local, state and federal leaders seeking to alleviate community testing shortages.

"None of the kits have been deployed, and no one knows when they will be," Harford County Executive Barry Glassman (R) said Tuesday afternoon. "In the environment that's out there, that need is not being met."

In conference calls with local and federal officials over the past two weeks, the Hogan administration said the tests were hung up by regulatory hurdles and shortages of other supplies that have throttled testing capacity nationwide, according to multiple people who participated.

Hogan publicly described a different reality on Wednesday, when he outlined for the first time how he will use the tests. He said he would prioritize universal testing in nursing homes and other hot spots, such as an outbreak at a poultry plant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The governor said the kits would also bolster testing for health-care workers and first responders. As a fifth priority, he would expand the broad, community-based testing experts say is critical to easing shutdown restrictions.

“As soon as we got the tests, everybody was like, ‘Can we have 100,000 of those tests?’ ” Hogan said of local leaders. “First of all, the state is going to maintain those tests. We’re not just going to send them off to people.”

Hogan spokesman Michael Ricci said there is no imminent shortage of swabs or other testing supplies significant enough to limit output at state-controlled labs.

Two private labs have been contracted to use the South Korean kits, Ricci said, and one cleared the necessary regulatory hurdle a week ago. Along with the state lab, he said, the private labs are adequately stocked to ramp up state testing to as much as 2,200 samples per day. That does not include capacity in hospital and commercial labs.

When asked why state officials offered different information in their closed-door conversations with county leaders and congressional staffers, another Hogan aide said the administration has been cautious about conveying the extent of its resources while it is trying to secure additional testing supplies. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategies.

[With nursing homes decimated by coronavirus, Maryland to test all residents, staff]

Additionally, despite the fanfare surrounding Hogan’s $9.4 million deal with LabGenomics, the test kits from Seoul were not in short supply in the United States, according to interviews with industry experts. Domestic manufacturers were producing millions of them per week when Maryland struck its overseas deal.  Some firms sell the kits for 20 to 30 percent less than what Hogan paid.

Ricci said the state picked the Korean company weeks before the shipment arrived, when market conditions were different, “based on a number of factors, including compatibility with our labs, market availability, reasonable market price, delivery methods and coordination, and overall trust and communication with the vendor.”

On Tuesday afternoon, a state Health Department official told congressional staffers that Maryland was missing critical testing components and had only enough supplies on hand to conduct 3,200 tests in state-directed labs, according to multiple people on the call.

The state official described specific shortages in nasal swabs, viral transport media and reagents, outlining a scenario that would allow Maryland to use less than 1 percent of the South Korean test kits.

State officials have offered no timetable for when the tests might be ready for community-based testing, according to interviews with local, state and federal officials involved in expanding Maryland’s testing efforts, which rank in the middle of the pack among states.

One local official said leaders of some of Maryland’s largest jurisdictions have become so frustrated they’ve discussed trying to obtain their own tests because they can’t access the ones from South Korea. Experts say dramatically enhanced community-based testing is critical to understanding the spread of the virus. Without more testing, it’s impossible to identify, track and isolate new cases.

“If they have all of those pieces, it’s time to get them into the hands of people who need them,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about private conversations. “We know there’s a need. . . . These sitting in a state warehouse somewhere doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Local governments have set up testing sites, where patient samples are collected via nasal swab and transferred to a lab for processing using the type of test kit Hogan acquired. In general, those sites will take only as many samples as labs can process in a timely way.

Hogan has said the South Korean tests are critical to meeting his goal of testing 10,000 people per day. At the news conference where he announced the purchase, he said he hoped to double that threshold, even as he acknowledged that the state would need more swabs, reagents and lab capacity to meet it.

[Meet the Maryland husband and wife who died of covid-19 days apart]

Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.) said Hogan's initial announcement led him to believe that Maryland was poised to implement widespread testing.

"What we learned over time is, that's not accurate," Brown said Wednesday. "A test means that you can take a sample and get a result, and he's not able to do that for 500,000 Marylanders."

Until the state can reach the ability to test 10,000 people per day, Brown said, Maryland residents are “going to stay locked up in our homes.”

County leaders from the state’s major jurisdictions have been on at least two calls in the past 11 days with state officials, including with Hogan himself, asking whether they can get some of the South Korean tests and when they can expand their own testing sites.

Baltimore County opened two new testing sites this week but limits <a href="https://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/News/BaltimoreCountyNow/baltimore-county-announces-two-new-covid-19-testing-sites" target="_blank" title="www.baltimorecountymd.gov">access</a> to 320 people a week because labs cannot process more.

“The test kits from South Korea are just a piece of the puzzle and still need the appropriate swabs, reagents and lab capacity,” said Sean Naron, a spokesman for Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski (D). “We are still waiting on a clear timeline from the state on when all these pieces will come together.”

The South Korea test situation has devolved to the point that Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) laughed Wednesday when asked about access to the tests. “Without things like reagents,” Elrich said, “they are sort of like paperweights.”

Hogan has consistently described his purchase of the tests as a necessary workaround after the federal government left it up to states to source their own testing programs in circumstances that pitted governors against one another.

On “The View,” he said he had to go abroad to find “the test kits that nobody had enough of.”

In recent weeks, however, it has not been a shortage of the tests themselves that created national scarcities, but the lack of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/04/22/nasal-swabs-shortage-coronavirus/" target="_blank">nasal swabs</a> to collect samples and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2020/04/22/the-health-202-here-s-one-big-reason-u-s-coronavirus-tests-are-lagging-test-kits-made-by-private-companies/5e9f0cba602ff10d49aea8b1/" target="_blank">the chemical reagents</a> to process them, experts say.

“If somebody had come to us a few weeks ago and said we need a large order for Maryland, we would have been very anxious and capable of taking the order and fulfilling it,” said Dwight Egan, CEO of a Co-Diagnostics, a company that makes the same type of tests Hogan acquired from South Korea.

“We’re shipping to nearly 50 countries,” he said. “We always love to ship in the United States because it’s a lot easier to ship domestically than foreign.”

A distributor for Co-Diagnostics offered Maryland more than 500,000 tests at a cheaper cost during a call on April 10, according to a person familiar with the pitch who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid scuttling future business.

Ricci, Hogan’s spokesman, said Maryland had signed a contract for the South Korean purchase just over a week before that, on April 2. Hogan has said he and his Korean-born wife, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/yumi-hogan-coronavirus-tests/2020/04/20/b4d53fea-8331-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html" target="_blank" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Yumi Hogan</a>, began working on the deal March 28.

The state reached out to several domestic suppliers along with the Korean firms in late March, Ricci said, but at the time, none could offer the volume and guarantees the state was seeking.

The United States got off to a slow start in its efforts to test for the novel coronavirus after delays this year caused by federal red tape and an initial flawed test created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other countries, such as Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, ramped up more quickly. But U.S. manufacturers worked fast to catch up.

By mid-March, U.S. manufacturers were able to ship tests to domestic labs by the millions. On March 18, Co-Diagnostics announced it could produce about 50,000 tests per day. Thermo Fisher Scientific announced on March 16 that it had 1.5 million tests on hand and expected to quickly increase production to 2 million tests per week, and the company has since reported it has ramped up to 5 million tests per week, many of which are being exported globally.

“No one is saying that they can’t get the test kits anymore,” said Lâle White, chief executive of XIFIN, a health information technology company that services a substantial portion of the nation’s commercial and public diagnostic labs and produces industry analytics.

Eric Blank, chief program officer for the Association of Public Health Laboratories, agreed. “As far as we can tell, there is not a shortage of the test kits,” Blank said in an emailed statement. “There are, and have been, shortages in the ancillary reagents and supplies (like swabs) throughout the response to date.”

Nevertheless, Maryland is not the only U.S. entity to buy tests abroad. This month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought 600,000 tests from two South Korean companies for a total of $8.2 million.

Hogan initially said Maryland paid $9 million for its tests, a figure state officials slightly revised upward Wednesday to $9,464,389.

That means Maryland paid $18.93 per test, while FEMA paid approximately $13.67.

In a statement, Ricci said Maryland’s price “was considered reasonable based on market value.”


When these Boston doctors ran out of virus-testing swabs, they mobilized an army of 3-D printers



Here’s one big reason U.S. coronavirus tests are lagging: Test kits made by private companies



Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help


Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | <a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/#/bundle/buzz" title="subscribe.washingtonpost.com">Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)</a>

Like PostLocal on Facebook | <a href="https://twitter.com/postlocal" title="twitter.com">Follow @postlocal on Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Latest local news</a>

University of Colorado, BS in journalism

University of Colorado, BA in biochemistry

Erin Cox is a politics reporter covering Maryland. She joined The Washington Post in 2018 and has written about Maryland since 2007.

Erin Cox

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA in journalism

North Carolina State University, BS in mechanical engineering

Steve Thompson writes about government and politics in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, he was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He started in journalism as a police reporter at the St. Petersburg Times.