Push is on to expand at-home testing
Biden’s plan would fund and distribute nearly 300 million kits
As President Joe Biden rolls out a significant expansion of at-home COVID-19 testing, it remains unclear how Connecticut will partner with the federal government in the effort, and health experts warn that the tests, while helpful tools, are not a panacea for the pandemic.
Rapid at-home testing would enable someone to take a COVID19 test without visiting a hospital, clinic or testing center and be able to receive the results within 10 to 15 minutes, rather than waiting for days. But the tests’ drawbacks — they are costly and less reliable than molecular tests — may mean that they are not long-term solutions for most people.
In an effort to combat COVID19 surges propelled by the delta variant, Biden announced that he would invoke the Defense Production Act to make 280 million rapid tests and distribute them to community health centers, schools and other facilities across the nation. Medicaid is also set to cover at-home tests for free for beneficiaries.
Connecticut is still awaiting information from the federal government about the role it might play in the effort to make at-home tests more accessible, acting Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Deidre Gifford said in a statement. And she noted that the cost of the tests could prove to be a “deterrent for many people.”
The Abbott Laboratories BinaxNOW and Quidel’s QuickVue two-pack both cost about $23.99. Major retailers, including Walmart, Amazon and Kroger have committed to selling the tests at a 35 percent discount, but only for the next three months.
Even so, the tests have proven
extremely popular recently, selling out in retail stores and online. CVS spokesperson Tara Burke said that the pharmacy chain offers four home testing products but has set purchase limits of six online and four at in-person locations for Abbott BinaxNOW, Ellume and Quidel tests.
In other countries, at-home COVID-19 tests are much easier, and cheaper, to obtain. The United Kingdom offers 14 tests per person for free; in Germany, grocery stores sell them for less than $1 per test, according to Kaiser Health News.
In Connecticut, Mark Masselli, the president and CEO of the Community Health Center Inc., said he expects to receive about 100,000 at-home COVID-19 tests from the federal government sometime soon, though he is “in the dark” about the specific timeline. But even that allocation would only be enough for one test per patient, he noted.
“Trying to get something in the home is helpful,” he said. “I’m just not sure the volume is going to sustain what might be the need.”
There are other drawbacks to the tests, too. While at-home tests are convenient and can quickly return results, health experts warn that they are not as accurate as molecular tests. Most at-home tests are antigen tests that can detect specific proteins from the virus, while molecular tests detect genetic material from the virus.
Dr. Ulysses Wu, an infectious disease specialist at Hartford HealthCare, said that at-home COVID-19 tests are “not as reliable as the molecular tests we do in the hospitals and some of our urgent care sites.”
If someone is symptomatic and an at-home test returns a positive result, it is likely that they have COVID19, he said. But if someone is symptomatic and receives a negative result, or is asymptomatic, they should seek out a PCR test.
“It certainly has its benefits, and it will certainly help with testing and supply and so on,” he said of at-home tests. “Whether or not it’s our way out of [the pandemic], I’m not exactly sure.”
Gifford said that while laboratory-based testing tends to be more sensitive than at-home antigen testing, “there is a role for at-home testing in the control of COVID-19.” For instance, a rapid positive result from an at-home test could help someone know more immediately that they need to isolate themselves and inform people they have been in contact with.
A Guilford-based company, Detect, is developing an at-home rapid molecular COVID-19 test that delivers results within an hour. A spokesperson for the company said that the technology is in a review process for emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration.
Most of all, Masselli, of Community Health Center, wants to see a large-scale strategy to make COVID-19 testing more available everywhere: in schools, work settings and on the street. Drive-through testing was effective during past surges of COVID-19 because people were used to picking up food at drive-through sites, he said. With those testing locations largely closed in Connecticut, getting a COVID-19 test can seem much more daunting to
many people. And expanding at-home testing may not be enough to bridge that gap, he said.
“I think the president’s headed in the right direction by driving prices down,” he said. “And I think the UK model, if we could do that — if each of these had 10 or 15 strips in them that somebody could do — that’d be perfect. That’s the missing equation.”