Amid a winter surge of coronavirus cases that sparked a nationwide scramble for tests last month, as many as 1 million unused Covid-19 rapid test kits expired in a Florida warehouse, a top state official said on Thursday.
The stockpile sat idle during the fall when cases fell in Florida and demand was low, Florida Department of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said during a news conference. The kits, manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, expired"before December 26 to December 30," Guthrie said, just as the state experienced a wave of new coronavirus cases driven in part by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
This week, a new report from public health experts at the University of Florida predicted the latest outbreak will cause many more infections than past waves,"potentially infecting most of the state's population." While infections may be less severe, the volume of cases could still make this the second deadliest wave of the pandemic, the models suggested.
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