I got curious about something yesterday: back on June 3, when Abbott shuttered a factory making home COVID test kits, did anyone raise a red flag? Did anyone yell and scream that we needed to keep producing them in case we had another COVID surge? Or is all the carping we hear today just 20/20 hindsight?
So I took a look. There was a White House press conference that day about COVID vaccines, but nobody mentioned home test kits. A bit of googling brought up nothing no matter what search terms I used. The front page of the New York Times said nothing about it during the following week. In fact, over the next month the Times ran only one article that even mentioned testing: a story about Germany using rapid testing as part of its strategy to beat the pandemic:
While rapid tests are available in other countries, they are not necessarily a cornerstone of the day-to-day reopening strategy.
In the United States, antigen tests are widely available, but they are not part of any national testing strategy. In New York City, a few cultural venues, like the Park Avenue Armory, offer rapid antigen testing on site as an alternative to proving vaccination status in order to gain entry, but that is uncommon. Widespread vaccination has also limited the demand for rapid tests.
That's pretty mild mannered, isn't it?
I have the same question about N95 masks, but I'm not going to bother searching for that. I'll bet nobody was screaming about masks either.
If there were lots of experts taking to the airwaves to warn that we needed more N95 masks and rapid tests in case COVID surged again, that would be one thing. Then it would be perfectly reasonable to slam the federal government for not doing its job.
But if nobody was warning about it, why would we expect the government to make it a priority? Complaining about it now is just a case of frustration looking for a scapegoat.
Six months or a year from now we'll probably find ourselves short of something else. So this is your chance: tell us what it will be. Unless you can do that—or, more to the point, unless our experts can do that—you should just shut up when the shortage finally emerges.
Thanks for this.
I haven't had much trouble buying N95 masks (I bought some today, in fact). They're expensive, of course, and I can see that being a significant issue for a lot of people.
Home test kits are stupid
There is no record of you having or not having COVID
We are turning a blind eye to this pandemic by using home test kits
If you have flu-like symptoms and you test positive, you have COVID. That's not stupid.
If you are early in an infection and asymptomatic, you'll probably test positive. That's not stupid either.
You know what is stupid? Claiming that a decent solution is worse than no solution at all.
I got no problem with the home test kits
Its the stats I have a problem with
Who will know?
Why is it we don't WANT to know how bad this was, is and could get?
You are supposed to inform your doctor or local health dept.
Shut up? Mr. Drum is getting chippy. Must be talking to some silly twits on Twitter.
I’ll bite. We’re out of syringes. And diluent. And vials. Stoppers. Caps. And lipids. And all sorts of materials used to make the various vaccines.
Since China is going on lockdown, virtually everything they supply will be short soon too.
“WASHINGTON — Companies are bracing for another round of potentially debilitating supply chain disruptions as China, home to about a third of global manufacturing, imposes sweeping lockdowns in an attempt to keep the Omicron variant at bay.”
Good luck.
We’re even running out of sand!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9331099/The-world-running-sand-mean-shortage-glass-vials-Covid-vaccines.html
Sounds like the Democrats campaign message has become clear. Republicans and the Chinese elite are in cahoots. Signed Donald Trump. Already hearing campaign adds in Ohio.
Anecdotal, so take this with a grain of salt
My daughter in MASS who was fully vaccinated, boostered and given the flu shot 3 weeks ago caught COVID according to the 3 home tests she took. She is in quarantine for a week, but in the meantime her employer is requiring a test be done and sent off to the lab to confirm the diagnosis.
Her waiting time for this test is 1 week at a minimum at all pharmacies and Urgent care facilities in MASS. She is a smoker but otherwise has no cormorbidities.
She feels terrible. Got a cough and other severe cold symptoms but the body aches are something she said she wouldn't wish on anyone.
According to the WSJ today herd immunity is a mirage with Omicron. Breakthrough infections for both vaccinated and previous infections are so high its useless to believe in any protections
Israel is also reporting today that the 4th shot is not doing well against Omicron. It was a small study done with participants from the Medical staff of a health care facility
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-trial-worlds-first-finds-4th-dose-not-good-enough-against-omicron/
{snip}
Nearly a month after Sheba Medical Center launched a landmark study to test the efficacy of a fourth COVID shot, the hospital said Monday that this fourth booster was only partially effective in protecting against the Omicron strain.
“The vaccine, which was very effective against the previous strains, is less effective against the Omicron strain,” Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, a lead researcher in the experiment said.
“We see an increase in antibodies, higher than after the third dose,” Regev-Yochay said. “However, we see many infected with Omicron who received the fourth dose. Granted, a bit less than in the control group, but still a lot of infections,” she added.
{snip}
Omicron is a different animal altogether. Home testing is NOT good enough if we are trying to gather information on this virus, which we should STILL be doing.
Allegedly Pfizer is going to have a new mRNA for omicron. Of course, it will be months before it’s available to even high risk folks. Good luck to your daughter. Hopefully it will pass in a few days. That’s what happened to folks I know.
Home testing should be fine. FDA reviewed tests and pointed out specific ones which would be expected to fail b/c the target(s) they were looking for were missing in Omicron -- https://bityl.co/AXZS. It might be that some folks are still selling old kits that will fail against Omicron, but if you get it via health insurer / fed gov't, you'd expect them to be usable for Omicron.
Your daughter's employer is following CDC guidelines for confirmation of a positive test, not understanding that what they should focus on is confirmation of a negative test to get back to work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Israel's report is no surprise. You could see that the mRNA vaccines had produced mismatched neutralizing antibodies. While the vaccines miss their target on antigens, it did stimulate and produce memory in T-cells to identify the Spike in SARS-CoV-2. That's why people who are vaccinated are significantly less likely to require hospitalization even though they get infected. Getting a 4th booster likely did nothing for most folks, except those who'd had enough time between boosters that the T-cells needed some reminding. In this case, these few people really needed the booster to avoid getting sicker.
Omicron could, in fact, with the next generation of vaccines, provide herd immunity. Omicron infection protects against Delta -- https://bityl.co/AXZd -- which combined with wider target vaccines, make it nearly impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to produce a variant that escapes immunity. Just saying.
Omicron will be gone before the next generation of vaccines will be available and we do NOT know how much post infection immunity will wane and how fast
With Omicron now spreading into India and China we could see stunning new variants coming out of those areas
Omicron's viral replication in the upper respiratory system makes it exceedingly difficult for another sub mutant to overtake it. The only remaining means of a sub mutant gaining fitness over Omicron is T-cell memory evasion. (I assume antibody evasion is irrelevant as what's saving people during Omicron is T-cell memory not neutralizing antibodies.)
But, SARS-CoV-2 Omicron now has a very short window to accumulate a combination of mutations that would enable it to evade T-cell memory, if you're concerned about Omicron sub mutants. Think about why Omicron infection rates drop so rapidly after hitting peak, first observed in South Africa and not being observed in UK and in early US jurisdictions.
If you're thinking that the margins outside of Omicron (places where Omicron has not yet taken over) might generate a competing variant, I think this is very much the more likely scenario. The compelling theory would be to have a completely different tree of mutants find its way to focus viral replication in the upper respiratory system, evade T-cell memory, and increase virulence, in a region where it doesn't have to compete with Omicron.
In a perfect world we would have perfect mitigation everywhere and SARS-CoV-2 would be nearly instantaneously eliminated. This is impossible. Our A/B track on the Trolley Problem is: Omicron/Something Worse. This is a practical but moral dilemma. People choose to ignore the dilemma and instead point to every last life that needs to be saved even though we have always had a deeply flawed response.
Correction: there are other ways to boost infectiousness of Omicron, they just seem less likely, given how far at the tail end of infectiousness that Omicron already sits in the pantheon of infectious respiratory viruses.
D_Orhk
She's management. She gets paid but they have to justify the pay so a positive test justifies the days out of work.
And while she knows that a negative test would help assuage her employers worries about her co-workers safety they are customer facing - so re-infection is a concern
And i spite of the marvels of our own bodies our b, and t cell responses are not consistent - especially in the immuno compromised
And just how many people have diabetes, crohns, psoriasis, and the myriad of other diseases that either cause immuno compromising to take place or the medicines to fight those diseases weaken the immune system?
Heck we're finding out COVID is causing an uptick in children's diabetes which in itself is an immuno compromising disease. We are a nation with so many aches pains and illnesses it will be hard for us to achieve herd immunity even with the new generation of vaccines.
Thank God we've gotten away from doing so many splenectomy's !!!!
If you're concerned about immune dysfunction -- diabetes, Crohn's, psoriasis, etc. -- I think you're overthinking vaccines and T-cell memory. If you're concerned with immunocompromised people -- chemo patients, others using steroids, people with genetic dysfunction (bubble boy) -- then sure.
Time will tell if I was wrong, but I still think we might luck out and the combination of Omicron and vaccinations will help us reach a Goldilocks point in the pandemic.
I am in the same boat, and state, as your daughter. My wife came down with "it" last Monday and I started feeling ill Tuesday. Got my booster in December along with my flu shot. Tested negative on the two home tests I got before Christmas. My PCP said the home tests are unreliable at best and may be even worse with detecting Omnicron. According to her she has at least a dozen patients currently ill and all have tested negative with home tests.
My fever hasn't been below 102 the entire week. This is the worst I've ever felt, and I got H1N1 as well. That was nothing compared to this.
Take that Ezra!
Sorry, Kevin, but I think this is kinda a dumb take. The question isn't whether the NYTimes or cable news pundits were yelling about rapid tests. The question is whether experts in or communicative with the Biden administration were pushing it. It's not the job of the media to predict the necessary preparations for a pandemic, anymore than it was their job to plan the the invasion of Normandy. It's the job of the federal government in conjunction with their chosen expert advisers in the private sector, think tanks, academia etc.
ETA:
"Complaining about it now is just a case of frustration looking for a scapegoat"
Complaining about failures and problems of government is called "reporting" and exactly what journalists and pundits ARE supposed to do so voters can hold them accountable.
Yes, I thought the idea of having expert professionals with executive authority was that they would be smarter and more foresighted than the press or the popular mood. If they're not, then they aren't really worth the money we spend on them, and there's no justification for judicial deference to executive agencies (Chevron deference).
The next generation of vaccines. The old ones will be plentiful but not in demand. The new ones, with wider targets and some cross-virus targeting (Influenza+SARS-CoV-2+RSV, etc.) will be incredibly popular. Biden administration needs to throw cash at these developments to get in front of the lines, if they haven't already done so.
Also reminder that you can already get free at-home tests via your private health provider and starting this Wed, you'll be able to get free at-home tests via the federal gov't at https://www.covidtests.gov/
I thought you made an interesting point, but I sort of wind up with kahner. I'm honestly not sure about the ultimate value of rapid antigen tests, but to the extent they are valuable, isn't it the job of the government to figure that out and act accordingly?
Sorry, but I no longer trust the accuracy of the rapid tests with Omicron. Symptomatic on Jan 6, unsure whether cold, flu, or covid. Jan 6 & Jan 7 tested negative on rapid tests. Jan 8 sent in a sample for PCR. Jan 9 & Jan 10 (morning) tested negative on rapid. Afternoon of Jan 10 got my PCR results back - positive.
Rapid tests missed my infection 4 times over a period of 4 days.
Lets note you can reduce Covid hospitalization by 15% every release due to h3n2 being the real cause. Worst flu season since 1968.
Testing, esp. home testing, was not a priority in the US.
There were a ton of tests available around Thanksgiving.
With Delta spreading, I think there was a ramping up of test production. Then omicron came along and overwhelmed all plans. There was also a legitimate question of whether or not the current tests would work with the new variants--so stockpiling a test for an old variant may not be that useful.
There are different issues going on here. Potential (standby) capacity is how many tests/vaccines/etc. can be produced once everything is ramped up--which would take months--vs. year(s) if you have to build out from scratch. The second is stockpiles--how many do you have on hand that can be shipped out now. PPE can be stockpiled. Vaccines and tests--maybe not so much, esp with new variants popping up.
There are plans to up our standby capacity--and some is being built out now. A lot of what was done for Covid was to switch existing capacity over to Covid supply production, with some build out of new facilities. Of course, it's not just manufacturing plants--but also supply chains.
Isn't the government the one that is supposed to be warning about it? After all, this is what they pay people to do.
yes. this post really makes zero sense to me. the media is not a branch of the federal government. it is not an advisory council to HHS. if the biden admin is doing it's pandemic planning based on NYTimes and CNN headlines, they're incompetent idiots.
A reliable national data base on Covid perhaps? I don't know what is out there, to be honest, and maybe we already have one that I don't know about. But we might have a need for excellent and more granular information than we have now.
There have been a few people in the US that have been pushing rapid tests since April 2020. One is Michael Mina ( https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelmina_lab?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor ).
Also, a few countries (Germany, UK, South Korea) have pushed rapid tests.
Between these two groups, there should have been, at least, studies early on in the US.
“ But if nobody was warning about it, why would we expect the government to make it a priority?”
Because that’s their job!!!!
It’s not MY job to figure out what we will need down the road. It’s not the job of some reporter at the Times. It’s the job the government experts. If they are not figuring out what we need, what are we paying them for? To read the Times?
I don't know, man. Personally, I would have preferred it if the government had been preparing for contingencies such as the mutation of the virus. Before delta is one thing. I was kind of hoping there was some kind of future multiverse tree at the CDC that included the world we're in now, but thanks for letting me know the NY Times should have told them to get on that.
"But if nobody was warning about it, why would we expect the government to make it a priority? Complaining about it now is just a case of frustration looking for a scapegoat."
As others have pointed out this is nonsense. The Biden administration should have made dealing with COVID their top priority. It is clear they didn't. Instead they have wasted a year trying and failing to get a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with COVID through Congress.
And it isn't true that nobody was complaining about the lack of rapid tests. See allahpundit for a roundup:
"Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard, has been making the case for widespread rapid testing since summer *2020.* Sixteen months later, he watched the president’s official spokesman scoff at the idea yesterday and was aghast:"
The Biden administration actually passed the American Rescue Plan Act, which seems to have quite a bit to do with combating both Covid-19 and the pandemic’s effects on the economy and society.
Is this a sneaky endorsement of Marginal Revolution on covid policy?
On June 3rd, the same day as the incident you cite no less: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/update-on-rapid-testing-for-covid.html
Or perhaps of Zvi, published on June 10th discussing what tools we would have available to combat a more infectious strain (crtl+f rapid test): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/06/10/covid-6-10-somebody-elses-problem/
Better sources of information exist out there.
Harvard prof Michael Mina was shouting about the lack of home tests in 2020, well before vaccines were widely available. He wrote an op-Ed in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/opinion/coronavirus-tests.html and appeared on the Pivot podcast in Dec. 2020 https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/expert-frustrated-at-lack-of-rapid-at-home-covid-19-tests/
I guess nobody in government was listening
My two cents:
1) Rapid tests, shmapid vests.
IOW, vast swaths of US society are so openly in rebellion against the very concept of trying to fight the pandemic that it almost doesn't matter what the executive branch does.* It might be a different story if the sane parts of America could be ring-fenced off against the crazy corners. But this sadly isn't possible. I don't think I'm exaggerating here, but I'm happy to be corrected (I returned to Asia nearly a year and a half ago, so my perceptions could be off).
2) To the extent that lack of testing supplies do make things worse, these issues go back to the pandemic's arrival in the winter of 2020, so the previous administration bears some of the blame. Nonetheless, the Biden White House can't let totally off the hook: they clearly bet big on vaccines as the ticket out, and lost. It was an understandable miscalculation, mind you, but they carry some of the responsibility for lack of rapid tests (a phenomenon that is hardly confined to the US, I should add). I write this as someone who acknowledges the current administration is massively better than the previous one with respect to fighting the pandemic.
*This is all the more true in light of the Republican Supreme Court's preferred vision of America as an outlier of anti-science pandemic laxity among high income democracies.
Yves Smith and the team at Naked Capitalism have been in the forefront on COVID-related issues including the lack of N95 masks and testing. If you're looking for an item that the NC hive mind is addressing today that (hopefully) will gain traction a year from now, I would say it's going to be the failure to address Indoor Ventilation.
Who is, of course, JOE BIDEN! And all "his" Democrats! Come one, people. This one isn't hard. This is an election year. The headline up through the election will be "Dems in Disarray!!" Not to mention "Biden Fails AGAIN".
The market is the reason for the low supply of Covid rapid tests. America's healthcare industry is not managed by any public institutions. Despite the mixed market policy of public subsidies for health care markets determine the demand before providing the supply.
The government is supposed to be forward looking no? Looking out for the collective welfare on its own initiative and such?
Back in December, you implied we'd have enough test kits if only we had national healthcare: https://jabberwocking.com/we-have-a-shortage-of-covid-testing-kits-because-nobody-ordered-them/ but unless someone warns the national healthcare folks they still wouldn't have ordered kits based on today's post.
Uh, they were screaming about them the next month, and the next, and the next and NOTHING was done.
Are you trying to be dishonest or is this just lazy thinking?
maybe kevin decided to try trolling his own blog for kicks.
There is a mistake in the whole way the pandemic was approached. When I was a member of the Swiss military we were taught that a plan needs to be designed for the worst case scenario. But our policy on COVID was always built on a rather optimistic "plausible" scenario.
We repeated the mistake of getting caught flat footed with insufficient supplies many times during this pandemic: Masks, PPE, ventilators, hospital beds, staff, tests (these were in short supply throughout). IMHO this is not the fault of outside experts, the keeping of emergency supplies is the domain of public servants and politicians (for the funding). They are the ones who failed.
Book your free Biden PCR test at curative.com (as well as other places -- check your state health dept)
Order your free Biden at-home COVID tests now at special.usps.com/testkits
Actually a number of experts have argued we need more test kits for quite a while. Michael Mina most prominently.
Similarly experts have been arguing we need N95 masks for awhile.
It would appear that the administration got complacent and argued that their vaccination efforts would be sufficient. They were incorrect.
And since this is, in the scheme of things, relatively straightforward to address, the administration’s reticence here seems inexplicable.
And what will be in short supply will be surveillance for new mutations.
Heck we are already short of adequate surveillance.
And for that we need lots of testing and in particular molecular testing.