COVID-19 tests harder to come by

As demand spikes, few appointments are open and home tests are sold out; Lamont pledges expansion

As end-of-year holidays approach, many Connecticut residents are confronting a dearth of available COVID-19 testing, as few PCR testing sites have open appointments and most pharmacies are sold out of rapid at-home tests.

State data shows that while demand for testing has picked up significantly since the summer, fewer Connecticut residents are getting tested now, on average, than at the beginning of the year, during the state’s last major surge.

“We hear it’s a disaster out there in terms of people trying to find access,” said Mark Masselli, president and CEO of Community Health Center, Inc., which operated test centers around the state earlier in the pandemic. “The demand is really increasing across the board.”

In response to growing scarcity of testing, Connecticut is expanding the hours of its 23 state testing sites, as well as adding seven additional sites, state officials said Monday. One new site, which uses saliva testing, opened Monday on the New Haven Green; the other six sites will likely be launched over the next week, according to Department of Public Health commissioner Dr. Manisha Juthani.

“I’ve heard the concerns: ‘Hey, I want more testing, I want it to be easier, I want it to be faster,’ ” Gov. Ned Lamont said during a press briefing Monday, noting that demand for testing in Connecticut has increased by about a third over the last few weeks.

The state is also suspending enforcement of its weekly testing requirement for unvaccinated state employees through Jan.

3. The suspension applies to all state employees except for hospital workers, who are required to be vaccinated unless they have obtained a religious or medical exemption. The state will continue to offer COVID-19 testing in prisons and other high-risk congregate settings, officials said.

About half of the demand at the 23 state-run sites comes from state employees fulfilling their testing requirements, Juthani noted,

adding that eliminating that pressure will be a boon to statewide testing capacity.

“What we expect that will do is free up a little bit of additional capacity for other residents in the state who are actually symptomatic or who were exposed, so that they can have a little bit of quicker access to testing,” said Josh Geballe, Lamont’s chief operating officer. “It’s tens of thousands of tests a week, so it’s a meaningful number, and with the holiday period coming up right now, we think it’s a smart move.”

In an ill-timed hit to the state’s testing capacity, SEMA4, the Stamford-based laboratory that has run 15 out of the 23 state COVID-19 testing sites, pulled out of its contract with Connecticut last week amid a controversy over investments made by the venture capital firm founded by Lamont’s wife. The company has agreed to extend its testing operation through the end of January, Juthani said.

Still, some COVID-19 testing sites that were open during the first year and a half of the pandemic have since closed, including a number of public testing sites run by Community Health Center.

“We were doing it in 26 sites across the state — you could go from Groton to Stamford, from Clinton all the way up to Enfield. We were a seven-day-a-week operation,” Masselli said. .

From November 2020 through February 2021, those sites were testing, a total of 4,000 to 5,000 Connecticut residents per day. Testing demand began to decline in the spring and summer, and the health center’s contract with the state ended this past summer, Masselli said. Currently, CHC only offers testing to its medical patients.

CHC had a stockpile of about 7,000 at-home rapid tests, which it has distributed to its patients. By now, though, that stockpile has been depleted and another shipment won’t arrive until early January, Masselli said.

“It doesn’t really meet the need,” he added.

Across the state, many testing sites had very limited availability — if any — in the days leading up to Christmas. As of midday Monday, a New Haven County resident would have to wait until Sunday to schedule a PCR test at a Yale New Haven Health site; Walgreens PCR testing in the region was full through the next Monday. A Walgreens spokesperson said in a statement that the pharmacy chain has seen increased demand for testing as the omicron variant spreads and that those seeking tests ”may need to book testing appointments 1-2 days in advance or expand their search area.”

In the Hartford region, Hartford Healthcare’s only drive-up testing location, in Newington, was booked out through next Wednesday, Dec. 29. CVS appointments for PCR testing were first available early next week; rapid tests were not available until later that week.

Rapid at-home tests, which were already becoming hard to find last week, are even more difficult to secure. At CVS, Quickvue and Binaxnow rapid at-home COVID-19 tests were out of stock online; at Walgreens, Binaxnow tests were sold out nearly everywhere in the state.

To meet demand, Hartford Healthcare is working to expand access to COVID19 testing and has extended the hours of its Newington site, said Dr. Jim Cardon, Hartford Healthcare’s chief clinical officer.

“We were running Newington a couple days a week and not having slots filled, so it has obviously picked up,” he said.

The health care system is also aiming to open four additional drive-through testing sites around the state by early next year.

“What we need capacity for is a lot of symptomatic testing,” Cardon said. He added that if additional drivethrough sites can handle testing for symptomatic individuals, it will help relieve demand at smaller-scale testing sites like pharmacies.

Walk-up testing sites may currently prove more accessible for some residents, including at locations across the state through SEMA4 and at some community health centers.

At Charter Oak Health Center in Hartford, which takes walk-ins for COVID19 testing, demand has increased in the past few weeks, more than doubling since early November, said president and CEO Nichelle Mullins. But it’s still far from what is was last year.

“A lot of people are showing up, but [Charter Oak] had lines down the block last year, so it’s nothing like that,” Mullins said. “Somewhere around 60 to 70 tests per week, that was a low in November; now we’re up to probably 200 tests per week. But we used to do that sometimes in a day.”