NIH director says COVID-19 testing too slow in U.S. to be effective

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said COVID-19 tests are taking too long to be processed in the U.S., "and that really undercuts the value of the testing, because you do the testing to find out who's carrying the virus and then quickly get them isolated so they don't spread it around." Collins told NBC's Meet the Press that the federal government needs to "invest a lot of money" in promising new technologies that allow for quicker turnaround. Currently it takes an average of four to six days for test results to come back, and up to three weeks in states like Arizona. "If we'd had really strong guidance from local, state, and national leaders, maybe we could have sustained the determination to get the curve all the way down to zero," Collins told The Washington Post. "Now, we're on the upswing, and I don't quite see the top of the upswing yet." [CNN, The Washington Post]

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