(Bloomberg) — The White House is moving to prevent future shortages of Covid-19 tests by ensuring they continue to be produced in large numbers even after the surging omicron variant recedes and demand fades.
“We’re going to keep moving at this speed, and faster, to get volume up on a monthly basis,” Tom Inglesby, President Joe Biden’s newly appointed testing coordinator, said in an interview.
Biden is under pressure to bolster availability of testing as the highly transmissible omicron variant fuels a record number of coronavirus cases. Americans are waiting in long lines — sometimes for hours — to get tested, and quickly snap up the limited supply of at-home kits from store shelves, leading to widespread frustration that poses a political risk for the president.
The U.S. recorded nearly 1.5 million cases on Monday, which have shuttered schools and forced businesses to close because of a shortage of healthy employees.
Biden’s administration has taken steps to expand availability, including a plan to ship 500 million at-home test kits to households that request them. Details about a website to order them will be released this week, Inglesby said, adding that shipments will start this month. It’s not clear how many tests will be immediately available.
U.S. capacity is about about 300 million rapid tests per month now, up from 50 million in September, according to the administration.
As of Saturday, the administration will require insurers to cover the cost of at-home tests.
“I can’t tell you the day, but I can tell you it’s going to get better and better,” said Inglesby, a physician who previously served at the Department of Health and Human Services. “The government is going to stay in this market.”
Inglesby was on the Biden transition team, and is on leave from his post as director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. (The school is supported by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Inglesby has a long history in health preparedness, and was chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Center for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2010 to 2019.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Biden adviser who called this week for a robust national testing strategy, said he spoke recently with Inglesby and offered suggestions. “I hope that we don’t do what we did before, which is assume we don’t need a testing infrastructure,” Emanuel said, with states and other entities scaling down testing when there was no demand. “In the summer, that turned out to be our big mistake.”
The shortage of tests was a dominant theme at a Senate hearing Tuesday, as lawmakers complained about the limited supplies. In a memo circulated to Capitol Hill, the administration said it’s seeking to increase the number of testing sites, the number of authorized tests, the overall supply and lowering the price.
Inglesby said there are more over-the-counter tests approved than last summer, when supply dwindled, and that the U.S. won’t see a similar slump after demand drops. The government will stay involved, including by buying tests. The administration spent $3 billion on tests last fall to spur production, but the volume wasn’t enough to meet the rapidly rising number of omicron cases.
“Obviously, it has not been enough, but omicron has put demand on testing all around the world,” he said.
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