U.S. eyes a boost in rapid COVID testing
The White House on Wednesday announced a billion-dollar investment in at-home rapid coronavirus tests that it said would help quadruple their availability by later this year.
By December, 200 million rapid tests will be available to Americans each month, with tens of millions more arriving on the market in the coming weeks, Jeffrey Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 coordinator, said at a news conference. Zients also said the administration would double the number of sites in the federal government’s free pharmacy testing program, to 20,000.
The changes reflect the administration’sgrowingemphasis on at-home testing as a tool for slowing the spread of COVID-19. President Joe Biden in September said he would use the Defense Production Act to increase the production of rapid testing kits and would work with retailers, including Amazon and Walmart, to expand their availability. He pledged $2 billion to the effort, or roughly 280 million tests.
The Biden administration’s commitment “allows the manufacturers to have the confidence in the demand to scale up their production,” Zients said. “It’s an expansion of the industrial base, so that more manufacturing occurs, based on the U.S.’s commitment to the testing sector.”
By December, the U.S. will produce about 500 million tests a month, roughly half of which will be the athome units, he said.
The Biden administration’s efforts to expand testing access received a significant boost Monday, when the Food and Drug Administration authorized Acon Laboratories’ at-home test. Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the agency’s medical devices center, said the move could double at-home testing capacity in the coming weeks.
“By year’s end, the manufacturer plans to produce more than 100 million tests per month, and this number will rise to 200 million per month by February 2022,” he said.
Like tests already available from other makers, Acon’s test is made to detect proteins from the virus on a nasal swab and produces results in 15 minutes.