WASHINGTON — As a respiratory virus sickens children across the country, spreading to hundreds in almost every state in a matter of weeks, the actual number of infections has remained a mystery.
That is because the volume of possible cases requiring testing has been so large — and the testing process so slow — that public health officials are working through a backlog that stretches back about a month.
This is about to change, as a new form of testing announced Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should provide an up-to-date number of people infected with enterovirus 68.
Even as the CDC acknowledged that the number of cases “will likely increase substantially in the coming days,” the agency stressed that this didn’t mean there was a sudden surge in enterovirus infections.
“These increases will not reflect changes in real time or mean that the situation is getting worse,” the CDC said in a statement.
Rather, the higher numbers expected sometime next week will be due to the new testing, which will screen more than four times as many samples each day as the older lab tests.
So far, about half of the samples sent to the CDC for testing have been checked. These tests have found nearly 700 confirmed cases in 46 states and the District of Columbia since the virus began sickening children in mid-August, according to the CDC.
The positive test results were found in about 60 percent of the 1,100 samples that have been tested from August through Oct. 10. About 1,000 samples still need to be tested, many of them received over the past month.
The older test, which had been used by the CDC for nearly a decade, required more time and labor, and it allowed about 40 tests to be conducted each day. The new test is shorter, has fewer steps and actually lets the CDC check out multiple samples at the same time. The CDC said it will now be able to conduct about 180 tests each day and have results in just a few days.
