Gov. Newsom Announces Increase in COVID-19 Testing Sites Across California

On Saturday, Governor Newsom gave an update on the state of coronavirus testing across California.

"The testing space has been a challenging one for us and I own that," Newsom said during a press conference. "It's a new day, and we are turning the page on our old approach."

So far, 126,000 Californians have been tested, which he confessed was "inadequate" and revealed several new initiatives to reduce the backlog in COVID-19 testing.

"We specifically have a new partnership with UC Davis and UC San Diego to create a minimum of five to seven hubs where we have high throughput where we will work with different vendors, not be prescriptive on the exact type of testing, but work with these hubs to significantly increase our testing capacity in our collaborative spirit within those hubs," Newsom said.

In addition, Abbott Laboratories has developed "point-of-care" tests which will be able to produce results in 5-15 minutes.

"These are tests where we can get results back in as early as 5 minutes (the Abbott test)," he said. "Abbott Laboratory is now committed to 75 testing sites in the state of California working with 13 of our hospital systems."

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Newsom also revealed the addition of a blood-based serum test developed by Stanford Medicine.

"We're pleased to announce Stanford Medicine, they've done a remarkable job to become the first in the state of California now to have the Serology tests, these are the blood-based tests that will be the first homegrown serum tests in the state of California," Newsom added.

He also announced the creation of a new website where people can submit a form if they have any personal protective equipment (PPE) to donate to the state.

As of Saturday, California has reported 12,519 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with at least 281 deaths.