Vermont’s Covid-19 testing landscape is changing. At the governor’s weekly press conference on Tuesday, Secretary Mike Smith said the state plans to shift toward more rapid testing and take-home options in its overall testing strategy.
However, implementing widespread at-home testing may be challenging due to limited supplies.
Throughout the pandemic, Vermont’s state-run testing sites have generally used PCR tests, considered top-notch for accuracy. But processing times mean results are often unavailable until the following day or later.
Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, state-run testing sites offered LAMP testing — a lower-cost, rapid turnaround option that state officials said is nearly as accurate as PCR tests, but can be processed on the same day.
Smith deemed this method generally successful: The state processed 1,130 LAMP tests on Wednesday, with results mostly available that day. About 100 people experienced delays and didn’t receive their results until Friday.
State officials also said they were looking into creating a program similar to one launched on Monday in New Hampshire, where residents there can order free at-home tests online for delivery, through a partnership with Amazon and the National Institutes of Health. (An NHPR reporter on Tuesday tweeted that users who typed in a New Hampshire ZIP code got a message suggesting the “limited supply” was “already exhausted.”)
Most rapid at-home tests use antigen testing, which produces results within minutes, but is less sensitive — and therefore can be less accurate — than LAMP or PCR testing.
In response to a reporter’s question at the press conference about at-home test availability, Smith responded, “If you can find 250,000 tests on a bi-weekly basis, I would — just tell me where to go and I’ll hunt them down.”
Many Vermonters couldn’t obtain at-home Covid tests in stores in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. Pharmacy employees told VTDigger shipments often sold out within a few hours of delivery.
“I can’t get them,” said Jeff Hochberg, director of Smilin Steve Pharmacy Group and president of the Vermont Retail Druggists Association. He said it’s hard for smaller, independent pharmacies to compete with large chains when trying to obtain tests from manufacturers.
John Koval, a spokesperson for Abbott, the company that makes the BinaxNOW at-home test, said the company has experienced no supply chain problems, and the BinaxNOW test is “broadly available in stores and online.”
Abbott has scaled up its manufacturing in Maine and Illinois and is now producing more than 50 million tests per month, Koval said.
A spokesperson for Walgreens said the company had not noted any unusual supply challenges in Vermont. A spokesperson for CVS wrote in an email, “We are prepared to meet our customers’ needs as we enter the holiday season,” and that there were no restrictions on how many tests each customer could purchase in-store or online.
However, a sign at the front counter at a CVS in Chittenden County last week said sales were limited to two per customer.
At the Kinney Drugs in Barre, the store couldn’t get any at-home Covid-19 tests on its shelves during a six-week period earlier this fall, supervising pharmacist Steven Simpson said. However, Simpson said they now have “ample supply” in their store and get frequent deliveries from the warehouse.
“We’ve sold over 600 of these test kits in just the last three weeks, so it’s been very, very popular,” Simpson said.
He said he’s noticed spikes in demand both leading up to Thanksgiving and after local school exposures.
But it’s not just individual customers in retail stores competing for those tens of millions of tests — it’s also businesses, long-term care facilities and schools. BinaxNOW is commonly used in Vermont’s test-to-stay program, which allows students who repeatedly test negative after a potential exposure to stay in school, said Ted Fisher, the Agency of Education’s Covid-19 response manager.
“We haven’t had someone ask for tests and not been able to provide them,” Fisher said. “On the other hand, we structured the system so that if we do run into a problem with getting (one) specifically, we never put all our eggs in one basket.”
Supply problems for at-home tests aren’t unique to Vermont. Recent reporting by ProPublica found that federal policies were a large factor driving high costs and scarcity, especially compared to other countries. (For example, in Great Britain, folks can get tests delivered to their homes for free.)
The federal government didn’t pump the same investment into rapid testing as it did vaccine production. ProPublica found the regulatory approval process often made it expensive and risky for companies seeking to bring at-home tests to market.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would focus review of emergency authorization requests on at-home, over-the-counter tests. The FDA has granted emergency use authorization to about a half-dozen new at-home Covid tests over the past two weeks.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Smith said state officials have been working with the White House to increase available quantities of rapid, at-home tests.
“We’ve asked for 250,000 to help with both long term care, with school testing and with general public testing, but that would only last us, you know, a matter of a month, maybe,” Smith said. “We need a really good supply chain in order to keep that going.”
— Liora Engel-Smith contributed reporting.
