(Abbott subsequently published a rebuttal to The New York Times’ report.) Now, with Delta blazing, turnaround times for laboratory tests have ballooned into several-day waits-potentially too late to stop an outbreak. Demand for tests plummeted so sharply that Abbott reportedly instructed factory workers to destroy their inventory earlier this summer, depleting their stocks just before demand skyrocketed again. Last winter and spring, as health departments pivoted their resources to vaccines, many mass testing sites closed, and surveillance efforts petered out. These tests are helping to fill a big diagnostic chasm. The credit-card-size contraption runs at roughly $25 for a pair of shallow-nose-swab tests, and can return a result in about 15 minutes. “It’s about availability and ease of use,” says Benedicte Callan, a health-policy researcher in New Jersey, who’s been regularly buying a popular at-home version of an antigen test called the BinaxNOW, made by Abbott Laboratories, for her family. Dozens of FDA-authorized tests now include a home-collection option although some need to be shipped out for processing, require a prescription, or call for telehealth supervision, others are available over the counter and can run from start to finish at home, no proctor necessary. Thanks to the rise of at-home diagnostics, people with means and access no longer have to tangle with the backlogged laboratory testing that plagued the country earlier in the pandemic. And with the world only partly vaccinated, interpreting test results has gotten trickier as well.Ĭoronavirus testing is in a much different place than it was a year ago. Delta has made blasé approaches to testing all the more precarious. Tests have never completely ruled out that someone is infected or infectious, which means they don’t work as one-off tickets to freedom, carte blanche to ditch other public-health recommendations. “I still see people throwing parties and testing people as they come in at the door,” Omai Garner, a clinical microbiologist and diagnostics expert at UCLA, told me.īut that, Garner and other experts say, is exactly the wrong approach. At an extreme, rapid tests have even become bouncers for big events- sports games, weddings, concerts, clubs-whereby negatives sometimes green-light people to enter packed indoor settings, or even strip off their mask. At-home tests are also being heavily marketed as an option for folks who feel healthy to screen themselves before they venture out into the world. People are turning to these tests when they feel sick, to avoid an onerous trip to a testing site or a doctor’s office or the days-long wait that tends to come with laboratory-based tests. Over-the-counter, at-home tests in particular have been flying off pharmacy shelves and out of online inventories, as companies scramble to scale up demand. Right now, that’s just about everywhere.Īs infections skyrocket, many Americans, like Dreifus, are clamoring once again for tests. But they can’t stave off those outcomes completely, especially in the parts of the United States where the super-transmissible variant is running rampant. Vaccines clearly still curb a person’s chances of catching the coronavirus and passing it on. By month’s end, spurred by Delta’s rise, the agency rolled those recommendations back. In early July, the CDC was still insisting that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to mask indoors, or seek out tests after virus exposures if they didn’t have symptoms-guidelines that hinged on the assumption that vaccinated people were almost never getting infected. Combined with masking, distancing, and socializing mostly outdoors, tests bring her extra peace of mind.ĭreifus’s decision turned out to be prescient. Dreifus knows the vaccines are still doing their part, but “Delta has basically taken us back to many of our pre-vaccination precautions,” she told me. She pulls them out when anyone feels a sniffle coming on, or when she and her kids, 15 and 18, are about to visit her elderly, vaccinated parents. She estimates that she’s now using at-home antigen tests-the over-the-counter ones that return results in minutes-to screen her family for the coronavirus about three times a month. “I knew I’d need to stock up on more tests,” Dreifus said. By July Fourth weekend, murmurs of post-vaccination infections, though uncommon, were starting to trickle into her social-media feeds. “We had about two weeks where I thought, Phew, we’re okay,” Dreifus, a special-needs-education consultant in New York City, told me. The final member of her household-her teenage son-reached the point of full vaccination. In mid-June, Joanna Dreifus hit a pandemic milestone.
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