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White House.

Before this week, few public-

health laboratories were able to

conduct tests. The CDC halted

shipments of a test it had devel-

oped, because the test was mal-

functioning. And the FDA hadn’t

given laboratories authority to

develop, validate and use their

own tests

Tests have come online since

then because the CDC dropped a

malfunctioning component and

the FDA streamlined its authori-

zation process.

Public-health labs have re-

ceived hundreds of CDC test kits

in the past few days, and thou-

sands more are expected, said

Scott Becker, chief executive of

the Association of Public Health

Laboratories, which represents

about 150 state and local public-

health labs.

Each kit can perform tests on

specimens for hundreds of pa-

tients. About 69 public-health

labs in the U.S. had on-site test-

ing capacity as of Friday, with

more expected over the week-

end, up from eight a week ago,

Mr. Becker said. He expects the

labs will soon have capacity for

testing about 10,000 people a

day across the U.S.

other 200,000 are expected to

be shipped Saturday. Testing re-

quires more than one specimen

per patient, so the number of

people who could be tested with

those supplies is fewer.

“We don’t have enough tests

today to meet what we antici-

pate will be the demand going

forward,” acknowledged Vice

President Mike Pence, who is

leading the administration’s re-

sponse to the outbreak, during a

visit to a 3M Co. facility in Min-

nesota on Thursday.

The Health and Human Ser-

vices department didn’t imme-

diately respond to a request for

comment Friday.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar said

Friday the federal government

has provided Washington and

California, states with some of

the highest number of cases,

with all the tests they re-

quested. The CDC has shipped

tests capable of testing as many

as 75,000 people to public-

health labs, and as many as four

million tests could be ready by

next week.

“The production and ship-

ping of tests that we’ve talked

about all week is completely on

schedule,” Mr. Azar said at the

Friday. The number of people in

the state with the infection rose

to 44 on Friday, officials said.

The number was 22 on Thurs-

day by officials.

The goal in the U.S. is to get

to a point where people with

symptoms can be tested quickly,

but that has proven to be a big

challenge.

“We are not at that point

now,” said Tom Inglesby, direc-

tor of the Center for Health Se-

curity of the Johns Hopkins

Bloomberg School of Public

Health, said at a briefing Friday

on Capitol Hill. “We don’t have

the bandwidth to do that now.”

U.S. Food and Drug Adminis-

tration Commissioner Stephen

Hahn said Friday at a press con-

ference that as of Thursday the

CDC had shipped out supplies

for about 900,000 tests and an-

tive Dow Constantine at a Fri-

day briefing.

Officials in Washington state

were hopeful for more testing

capacity soon, though not nec-

essarily from the federal gov-

ernment.

But even as New York City

said it didn’t have enough, New

York state officials said the

state, has enough test kits for

the moment.

The state Department of

Health said it had about 3,

test kits available, which it con-

sidered to be an “ample supply,”

a spokesman said. Roughly 300

tests have been conducted at

the state’s Wadsworth lab since

Sunday, the spokesman said. He

added that the state could con-

duct tests on samples from New

York City.

The state can test about 500

samples a day, said Gov. Andrew

Cuomo at a briefing Friday, and

it hopes to increase its capacity

to 1,000 samples a day. The bot-

tleneck was laboratory capacity

and not test kits, Mr. Cuomo

said.

About 4,000 people in New

York state are in quarantine and

being monitored for symptoms

of the virus, state officials said

States on the front lines of

the coronavirus fight are com-

plaining about the availability of

test kits, exposing strains in the

nation’s battle to contain the

epidemic.

New York City’s deputy

mayor for health, Raul Perea-

Henze, struck an urgent tone in

a letter Friday to the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention,

saying the test kits provided to

the city don’t meet its needs.

“Slow federal action on this

matter has impeded our ability

to beat back this epidemic,” he

wrote.

As of noon Friday, 94 people

had been tested in New York

City, according to the city’s

health website. Nearly 2,800 are

in quarantine, officials said, and

the city needs to be able to test

hundreds a day.

A representative of the CDC

didn’t respond to a request for

comment.

The CDC is now shipping

hundreds of test kits. Some pub-

lic health labs and private lab

companies have also rolled out

their own test kits. Large com-

mercial lab companies including

LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics

Inc. are launching coronavirus

testing services.

That has increased the ca-

pacity to test samples to thou-

sands of people a day, a marked

improvement from the relative

few the CDC was able to evalu-

ate at its Atlanta laboratories

while it tried to work out the

kinks in a test it had developed.

Yet the improvement isn’t

enough, public-health experts

and government officials say,

especially after the CDC re-

cently broadened the criteria

for testing to anyone who shows

signs or symptoms, had traveled

to a country with an outbreak or

come into contact with a con-

firmed case.

Public health officials in King

County, Wash., have called test-

ing capacity inadequate in the

state, where all but one of the

U.S. coronavirus deaths have

taken place.

“We’ve been waiting for an

increase of testing capacity in

our community. It has been a

tremendous strain for public

health to have to triage those

tests,” said King County Execu-

answer whether they had insur-

ance covering the cancellation.

Local officials called the de-

cision a data-driven one, based

on health concerns that some

of the festival’s attendees

would be coming from regions

where the virus had spread

and would be in proximity

with tens of thousands of oth-

ers. As of Friday, Texas had

confirmed six cases of corona-

virus, all of them in the Hous-

ton area.

tended party. It now brings

hundreds of thousands of peo-

ple from around the world to

Austin each spring, including

many celebrities, politicians

and CEOs.

Organizers released a state-

ment expressing disappoint-

ment that the festival had been

canceled, noting that it was the

city’s decision. They added that

they were exploring the option

of rescheduling the event.

A spokeswoman declined to

tend, and more than 50,

signed a petition urging that it

be called off, putting pressure

on organizers and public offi-

cials to make a decision.

Since its inception as a fu-

ture-minded music festival in

1987, South by Southwest has

grown to include film and

technology, becoming an influ-

ential gathering for discussing

and promoting new movies,

artists, apps and other prod-

ucts—as well as a popular ex-

in the city,” Austin Mayor

Steve Adler said in a news

conference, adding that the or-

der effectively cancels South

by Southwest for this year.

City leaders and health offi-

cials had said this past week

that the tech, film and music

festival would go on as

planned starting March 13. But

a wave of companies including

Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. Net-

flix Inc. and Twitter Inc. said

their employees wouldn’t at-

AUSTIN, Texas—The South

by Southwest festival has been

canceled due to concerns

about the coronavirus, the

city’s mayor said Friday, the

latest major event to be called

off because of fears of the

fast-spreading disease.

“After consultation with the

city manager, I’ve gone ahead

and declared a local disaster

York Genome Center, a non-

profit research institution.

Though right now, infectious

disease experts say there isn’t

any evidence that Sars-CoV-

mutations have made the virus

behave differently.

These small tweaks in the

genetic code also build up as a

virus spreads, copying over all

of the previous mutations

when it replicates while add-

ing new ones. And as the virus

spreads in different geo-

graphic directions, so do its

mutations, making genomic

branches that researchers can

follow back to the root.

“Just by these little finger-

prints that are within each of

these viruses, you can know

who acquired it from whom,”

said Elodie Ghedin, a molecu-

lar parasitologist and virolo-

gist at New York University

School of Global Public Health.

“You can track transmission.”

On Tuesday, researchers

from the Peking University

School of Life Sciences and the

Institut Pasteur of Shanghai

said that the novel coronavi-

rus had evolved into two “ma-

jor types,” according to a pa-

per published in National

Science Review. One of those

types was more prevalent in

70% of the patient samples

studied, leading the research-

ers to suggest that the variant

might be more “aggressive,”

though they noted the findings

were still preliminary.

But the study analyzed only

103 genomes out of the more

than 101,000 global infections,

experts who weren’t involved

in the study pointed out. And,

while there was a slight ge-

nomic variation, which is ex-

pected, there wasn’t enough

evidence to make claims about

differences in severity or how

easily the virus spreads, the

virologists said.

“To say it’s infecting more

people because it’s more ag-

gressive is a huge leap,” Dr.

Grubaugh said. “We don’t see

that mutations are associated

with higher case fatalities or

rates of transmissions.”

The authors of the study

didn’t respond to requests on

Friday requesting comment.

Although mutations do oc-

cur, understanding what that

means for fatality and spread

rates is difficult to study, and

takes years of lab experiments

to come to a conclusion, Dr.

Grubaugh added.

Still, researchers are keep-

ing pace with the variations of

the novel coronavirus, con-

necting the dots between

cases by sharing the shifting

genetic codes in different pa-

tient samples. On Jan. 10, sci-

entists in China made the vi-

rus’s genome available online,

and researchers have since se-

quenced at least 167 samples

taken from different patients

across the globe.

“There are groups all over

the world that are sharing se-

quence data in real-time,” said

Trevor Bedford, an associate

member of the Vaccine and In-

fectious Disease Division at

the Fred Hutchinson Cancer

Research Center in Seattle.

Scientists tracking muta-
tions of the new coronavirus
say there is no evidence its
changes have made the virus
deadlier or more contagious.
But they are tracking the
virus’s genetic changes, which
are common and typically be-
nign, to better understand
how it is being transmitted
around the world and help
combat its spread.
The novel coronavirus, or
Sars-CoV-2, and all other coro-
naviruses are made up of RNA,
which has a slightly different
chemical makeup than DNA.
Viruses with an RNA genetic
code also mutate easily. When
the virus makes a copy of it-
self, it often makes mistakes
and changes a small piece of
its genome, which helps it
adapt to its environment.
“It’s a natural process of a
virus being a virus,” said Na-
than Grubaugh, an assistant
professor of epidemiology of
microbial diseases at the Yale
School of Public Health. But
those changes aren’t innately
dangerous. Virologists say
most mutations are “silent,”
meaning they don’t change
any of the virus’s behaviors.
Mutations could also crip-
ple a virus and effectively kill
it. Others could make the virus
more infectious and dangerous
or less severe, said Neville
Sanjana, a human geneticist
and bioengineer at the New

BYBRIANNAABBOTT
ANDKATIECAMERO

Scientists Don’t Find Alarming Mutation

Viruses often change their genetic makeup, and researchers are

tracking the new coronavirus to better understand how it spreads.

EMANUELE CREMASCHI/GETTY IMAGES

BYREBECCAELLIOTT

ANDELIZABETHFINDELL

Austin Cancels South by Southwest Festival

BYPETERLOFTUS

ANDLESLIEBRODY

Test-Kit Supply Falls Short of Demand

Customers line up outside a pop-up store in Washington, D.C., offering masks for sale. The CDC is now shipping hundreds of test kits.

SAMUEL CORUM/GETTY IMAGES

The number of confirmed
coronavirus cases globally
topped 100,000 on Friday, as
infections spread to new parts
of the U.S. where officials
struggled to get the epidemic
under control.
Across the U.S., state offi-
cials voiced a need for higher
Covid-19 testing capacity as
positive cases multiplied in
the country’s hardest-hit
states and the first ones ap-
peared in several others.
Local officials in the hard-
est-hit U.S. states warned vul-
nerable populations to avoid
public gatherings as organiza-
tions canceled events, schools
moved classes online and busi-
nesses ordered employees to
work from home. In Austin,
Texas, city officials canceled
the annual South by South-
west festival.
Two more people died from
the virus, raising the U.S.
death toll to 14. Cases in New
York doubled Friday to 44,
while a number of states in-
cluding Maryland, Indiana, Ne-
braska, Kentucky and Pennsyl-
vania reported their first
infections.
Off the coast of San Fran-
cisco, 21 people, including 19
crew members, tested positive
for the virus aboard the West
Coast-based cruise ship called
the Grand Princess, Vice Presi-
dent Mike Pence said Friday.
Officials placed a hold on the
ship this week amid an out-
break on board. One elderly
passenger who likely caught
the virus aboard the ship last
month died earlier this week.
She was the first death re-
ported in California.
President Trump on Friday
signed a $8.3 billion emer-
gency spending bill, which in-
cludes funding for research ef-
forts to develop a vaccine,
allocates money to state and
local governments to battle
the outbreak and sends dollars
overseas to assist response ef-
forts. The Trump administra-
tion also granted exclusions
from import tariffs for neces-
sary medical items—like face
masks, examination gloves and
sanitizing wipes—from China.
Massachusetts officials said
the number of cases among
state residents rose to eight,
most who went to conference
hosted last week by Biogen
Inc. at a Boston hotel. So far,
eight cases—five from Massa-
chusetts and three from out of
the state—have been linked to
the Biogen meeting.
The novel coronavirus is
now in around 90 countries,
less than three months after it
was first identified in the cen-
tral Chinese city of Wuhan.

BYJENNIFERCALFAS
ANDLUCYCRAYMER

Covid-

Infections

Surpass

100,

Some of the

hardest-hit places

say they can’t get

enough tests.

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