WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s announcement that all Americans will have access to free, at-home rapid coronavirus tests is a welcome development, but comes too late to have an impact on the wave of omicron cases that is only expected to grow, experts say.
Epidemiologists and public health experts have implored the White House to take this action for months, encouraging the administration to expand the supply of at-home tests for Americans to use on a routine basis.
More recently, experts have warned the administration that the tests will be a vital tool in slowing a wave of cases from the omicron variant, which could soon overwhelm U.S. hospitals.
“It’s totally inadequate with respect to the number and timing,” said Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president and a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research. “But at least it’s a first step in the right direction of distributing free rapid home antigen tests, which are pivotal for preventing spread.”
Americans won’t be able to order the free test kits until January, when the new federal website for the test kits will launch, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday. The administration has not decided how many test kits each household will be allowed to order and how long it will take for them to ship.
A White House official told McClatchy that the program is starting now in part due to recent approval by the Food and Drug Administration of additional rapid at-home testing kits, which increased the manufacturing of tests.
The official pointed out that in France, the United Kingdom and Belgium, among other countries in Europe, the same tests are also in short supply due to a surge in demand.
“I think there’s an important note here on the realities of testing and manufacturing capacity,” the official said. “We’re going to have dramatically more manufacturing capacity for the winter.”
In the meantime, the administration is opening new free testing sites over the next two weeks and sending 50 million tests to rural health centers.
The new sites should alleviate long lines that have emerged in cities where the omicron variant of the coronavirus has already begun to surge — particularly New York City, which will get new testing sites by the end of the week, Biden said.
“The bottom line is, it’s a lot better than it was, and we’re taking even more steps to make it easier to get tested and tested for free,” Biden said in a speech at the White House.
Omicron was first identified over a month ago in southern Africa, raising questions among some epidemiologists about why the expansion of testing access did not begin sooner.
Dr. Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University and Bellevue Hospital in New York and a former member of Biden’s presidential transition team on COVID-19, said the new program is unlikely to impact the omicron wave in the United States if the country follows a similar track seen in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Both have experienced a rapid increase and decrease in cases over a period of just three weeks.
“The announcement today about having a website where people can order rapid tests and get them for free, delivered to their homes, I think is really important,” Gounder said. “The initial supply of half a billion test kits, when you consider 500 million test kits for 330 million Americans – that’s not even two test kits per American, and that’s not nearly enough. So I really hope they start to ramp up manufacturing quickly.”
Even if the tests do not alter the outcome of the omicron wave, the program will be helpful for future waves, Gounder said.
“I don’t think these rapid tests will really become that much more widely available in that short a period of time,” she said. “But the worst thing we could do is say that omicron will be over in another month, so why bother doing these things? There will be other variants. We need to have the tools available. And I think we have to have more of a preparedness, just-in-case approach to things.”
“We’ll continue to expand testing capacity,” the White House official said. “We do believe there’s more work to be done on testing to meet the demand.”
White House officials note that the 500 million tests available are not the only tests on the market. The administration last month spent an additional $1 billion on expanding access to rapid at-home testing kits, allowing Americans to seek reimbursement for the tests with insurance coverage, and continues to add PCR-based testing facilities across the country.
“I think that it is important and reflects what the country needs, which is very inexpensive — in this case free — home tests,” said Dr. Eric Toner, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“My only concern is that the omicron wave is racing at us so fast that these tests may not be available in time to help in the exponential growth phase of the epidemic,” Toner added.
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