CDC: Coronavirus test kits flawed

Some of the coronavirus testing kits sent to states and to at least 30 other countries have flaws and do not work properly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

The kits were meant to enable states to conduct their own testing and get results faster than they would by shipping samples to the CDC in Atlanta. But the failure of the kits means that states still have to depend on the CDC, which will mean several days’ delay in getting results.

The CDC announced last week that it had begun shipping about 200 kits to laboratories in the United States and roughly 200 more to labs in more than 30 other countries. Each kit can test about 700 to 800 specimens from patients, the agency said.

Officials have not said how many of the kits are flawed.

On trial runs in some states, the kits produced results that were “inconclusive,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at a news conference Wednesday.

“Things may not always go as smoothly as we may like,” Dr. Messonnier said.

She said the CDC was working closely with the states and would send out new ingredients to laboratories that have encountered the problem.

There have been 13 confirmed cases of the infection in patients in the United States so far. About 850 evacuees have been quarantined at military bases after returning from China. Still others are under self-quarantine at their homes.

The flawed test kits are a separate issue from the mislabeled samples in San Diego that led officials to discharge from the hospital a woman who was sick from the coronavirus.

More than 1,100 people have died, nearly all of them in China, where there are more than 44,000 confirmed cases.