Was the Government At-Home Tests Distribution Program a Huge Waste of Resources?

 

The other day, I was feeling a little sniffley, so I decided to crack open one of the at-home COVID-19 test kits the government has sent me over the last couple of years. There was a time there where they'd periodically send you four kits (two tests each) per household if you requested it. 

I have received two tranches of these. When I tore into the envelope for the first one, I saw that all the tests had expired about 18 months ago. I opened the second envelope and its four tests had expired about a year ago.

When I got my booster last fall, the pharmacist asked if I wanted some at-home tests. Not knowing the ones I had were expired, I said "no I have plenty." However, she insisted I take them, just in case. 

Good thing I did, because I had to resort to one of those for my sniffles incident (test was negative). I note that the other tests in that batch will expire at the end of next month.

What is going on? I checked and the FDA says the tests have a shelf-life of about six months. The tests don't stop working at that time, they just become less accurate. But as I have blogged about before, those tests don't have that great of an accuracy level to begin with, so you don't want to mess around with an expired kit that is even less accurate.

So I have (so far) discarded 16 tests because they are past expiration. This has gotten me wondering whether it was a great idea for the government to just mail these to people like they did. 

After all, they are only needed once you get COVID-19, and in any given six month period, most people do not get COVID-19. That means millions of these tests were sitting around people's homes going bad.

How much did this cost us taxpayers? It seems nobody wants to say, so let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. One set of figures in that link said the government paid $2B for 360M tests, which breaks down to $5.26 per test. There have to be another couple bucks in processing and mailing, so let's call it $7.26 per test

I have discarded 16 of these, pegging the cost just for me at $116.16.  Again we don't know the actual numbers, but let's assume about 2 in 3 people requested the tests and had those expire too. That amounts to around $1.5B for tests that were just discarded.

That seems like a huge waste. One wonders why instead of mailing these out the government didn't have a different program that distributed them one-at-a-time, as-needed at pharmacies or grocery stores. 

Under that kind of program I would have consumed only one test in the last 2.5 years instead of 24. Then if I need one in March I could just go get one free rather than buying it, which is what I will have to do now.


Popular posts from this blog

Looks Like Immune Responses are Enduring After All

Image
 For some time, public health officials have fretted about whether immunity to COVID-19, acquired via infection or vaccination would stick.  Studies showed rapid declines in antibodies during recovery from infection and thereafter . It turns out that this concern was overblown. A study just released says bone marrow plasma cells are a persistent source of protective antibodies, and that "circulating resting memory B cells directed against the S protein were detected in the convalescent individuals."   Another study , yet to be reviewed, suggests that vaccines boost this effect. In fact, some are suggesting this situation this could actually mean  lifetime immunity .   Whether the same thing happens with vaccination is not clear. Most estimates suggest that vaccine immunity will last about a year . More pessimistic estimates putting the protection period at six months .  The possible shorter time frame, plus the appearance of the new variants, have the vaccine makers working
Read more

Another One Bites the Dust

Image
Hi all. Stepping out of retirement for a moment to say that the day has finally arrived. After four years of successfully avoiding COVID-19 infection I had a positive test yesterday. Symptoms are very mild—I've had worse colds. The provider at urgent care said almost all the cases they are seeing are the same. Mild symptoms may also be due to the fact that I had the original vaccine then the two boosters. All this time I thought I might be a NOVID —one of those people who never get the bug. But no, it must have been my assiduous mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk situations when things were bad. So here's double middle fingers to all the kooks who think masks don't work (I've not been wearing masks for months now). I don't know what variant I have but it's likely JN.1. It is said to be extraordinarily contagious and accounts for 60% of cases worldwide . It also tends to produce mild infections like the one I have.  This article claims that right now every
Read more

AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending November 9: Everything is Going South

Image
Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Well this isn't good. The lull seems to be over. Virtually every number is up, both over a week and over four weeks. The most worrisome is hospital beds, which have been steadily trending up over the last several weeks.  Wastewater signals are all up except Tempe (dashboard is up again) which after going up last week (from 41 to 100) decreased by about 10%. The increases are worrisome because the latest data from ASU's Lim Lab (last updated October 31), where they sequence PCR samples to identify variants, shows that only about 46% of sequences showed BA.5. That is one of the Omicron variants the new bivalent vaccine was designed to protect against.  All the rest of the samples are BA.2.75 (7.7%), which I flagged several weeks ago, and BQ,1.1 (15.4%), and BQ.1 (30.8%), both of which I blogged about a couple weeks ago.  Those, new research confirms , are much more lik
Read more