Everyone Need Access to At-Home COVID Tests

“Anyone who wants a COVID test can get one.” When that proclamation was made back in May 2020, it wasn’t true. There was a scarcity of testing supplies and limited sites, and it could take weeks to get back the results — making many of them essentially useless in clinical decision-making. The initial rapid tests on the market were a wild west of different companies who failed to ensure accuracy of their tests — -resulting in significant error rates.

By the time the vaccines were authorized early this year, many of these problems had been fixed. Testing capacity increased, yet the demand dramatically decreased — from a high of 3.6 per 1000 population in March to 1.8 per 1000 population in July. Molecular tests — commonly referred to as PCR tests — now provide results much sooner (sometimes in a day!) while rapid tests are more accurate, especially for those persons who are symptomatic. Best of all, these tests can now be done in the home. This can help reduce community spread by isolating infected people more quickly as well as enabling efficient contact tracing.

In what may be viewed as an error in strategy, public health officials almost exclusively focused on getting people vaccinated in the last few months, with little attention paid to the need for widespread testing. Having the ability to test at home will likely catch infections sooner…