Creating yet another hole in the pandemic data
opular at-home COVID-19 tests from Abbott Laboratories and Quidel Corp., available without a prescription, were launched without a mechanism for reporting results to health officials, potentially leaving many cases uncounted by authorities as the delta variant spreads around the U.S.
COVID cases are still one of the best indicators of the direction of the pandemic, and health officials are watching them as closely as ever for signs that the latest surge may be near a peak, at least in some parts of the U.S. Although new, accessible testing technologies have been helpful, data gaps can be dangerous, said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies diagnostics.
About 9% of U.S. virus tests over the last seven days returned positive results, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention In a response to the same article provided to Bloomberg, Abbott said that test cards were destroyed, not completed products, and that they were near the end of their shelf life and couldn’t have received approvals quickly enough to be provided to governments overseas. Abbott chose to store parts of those tests, such as reagent bottles, swabs and nitrocellulose strips “in the event that we needed to scale back up, which is exactly what’s happening now,” according to a statement.