SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) – Governor Newsom says California has met and exceeded its daily testing goals, now averaging more than 100,000 tests a day. But that’s coming with some bumps in the road.

The problem — delays in getting a test and delays in getting the results.

While San Francisco’s two city test sites on 7th Street and the Embarcadero are averaging about 1,500 tests a day, nearly 90-percent of the results are being released in less than 2 days but not all test sites are alike.

“I had my test on Saturday the 27th,” Cory Warren said.

San Francisco resident Cory Warren went to one of Verily’s project baseline sites in Bernal Heights to get tested due to a persistent cough.

Now 12 days later the cough is gone, but he’s still waiting for results and got an email that it could be up to 10 business days.

“It’s disappointing because if they are trying to protect the public and I had it, which I don’t think I do, I could spread it quite a bit unknowingly,” Warren said. 

Health experts say his concerns are very real.

“The longer it takes you to get test results back the more likely those people will develop infection and go out and spread it,” Dr. George Rutherford said. 

UCSF virology professor Dr. George Rutherford says until there’s a vaccine, controlling the spread of COVID-19 is best done by identifying and quarantining those who are positive and then isolating the people they’ve been in contact with, which is why a quick return on results is critical.

“To the extent there are long delays that makes the contact racing less effective, you want it to happen quickly in order to find the people infected, contact the infected and get them tested and in isolation and quarantine,” Rutherford said. 

“Because of the backlogs at quest and others we are seeing multi day delays,” Newsom said. 

During his update Wednesday, the governor acknowledged the delay in results and said it was being addressed.

“We are looking to match some of our testing capacity with local labs with many of our hospitals and not using these national labs where we are seeing many of the delays occurring,” Newsom said. 

The governor is expected to release new strategies for testing on Friday or Monday.

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