(Bloomberg) -- Expanding testing for the Covid-19 virus in the U.S. will result in a “spike in the curve” over the next week as more cases are uncovered, a top White House aide said.
“For those of you who watched China, and China reporting, remember when they changed their definition and all of a sudden there was a blip in their curve? We are going to see that,” Dr Deborah Birx, virus response coordinator, said at a briefing by the White House coronavirus task force.
“We are going to see a spike as more and more people have access” to the tests, Birx said.
There have been 3,365 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. so far, with 64 deaths. Cases of the highly-infectious virus are now present in every U.S. state except West Virginia. New York, Washington, California and Massachusetts have been some of the hot spots.
At least ten states now have the availability of drive-by testing for the coronavirus as tests ramp up nationwide after a slow start, said Vice President Mike Pence.
Pence, head of the task force, Birx, and other officials including President Donald Trump, spoke at Sunday's briefing.
It's important, as testing capacity increase, that the people “most in need” have priority access, Pence said. That would include first responders and health care workers. He urged people who are symptom free to not seek testing.
Read more: Trump Says to Buy Fewer Groceries After Virus Depletes Stores
Pence also said that updated guidelines would be coming on Monday about public gatherings in the U.S. That announcement seemed to have been pre-empted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which on Sunday recommended that gatherings of over 50 people in the U.S. be scrapped for the next eight weeks.
Many cities, municipalities and states have announced their own measures to press “social distancing” as a way to “flatten the curve” -- shorthand for slowing new cases enough so as not to overwhelm hospitals and other parts of the health care system.
Alex Azar, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, joined other medical professionals in warning that the Covid-19 pandemic “runs the risk of exceeding our health care system capacity, and we must acknowledge that.”
Earlier, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said on CBS that the U.S. could “handle a ‘Wuhan' in one major city, and pull resources” -- a reference to the Chinese city that was the initial epicenter of coronavirus spread. “I worry about multiple cities having that kind of outbreak,” Gottlieb said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net;Anna Waters in Washington at awaters27@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny
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