Coronavirus updates: U.S. death toll tops 60,000 as labs race for a vaccine

Texas is going ahead with its planned partial-reopening on Friday despite mounting coronavirus cases and calls for more widespread testing. Data suggests the state is doing less than half of its ideal projection of testing 40,000 people a day and, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said his area needs “about four times as much testing” as they currently have before returning to business.

“Texas – it fights each day to be either dead last or next to last on the amount of testing,” Jenkins told CBS News’ Omar Villafranca, “To open up, you need to see [the number of cases] go down for two weeks.”

Jenkins also called for testing to be put in place for those returning to work, so that if an employee gets sick they can be quickly detected and isolated in order to keep others safe.

“We’re not able to do that yet,” he said.

Rural areas are also experiencing testing issues. Dr. Brian Weis, chief medical officer at an Amarillo hospital that serves thousands in rural Texas, said they simply do not have enough tests to give.

“There’s a lot of patients who are coming to our emergency rooms who may have symptoms that suggest COVID, and we send them home and say, ‘Take care of yourself. We can’t test you,'” Weis described. “We just really don’t have the capability to test right now.”

The state has reported over 26,000 coronavirus cases and more than 700 deaths in its roughly 29 million residents. At the time of reporting, Dallas county had tested less than 1% of their 3.6 million residents, and over 3,000 had already tested positive for COVID-19.

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