WASHINGTON (AP) – Just five weeks ago, Los Angeles County conducted more than 350,000 weekly coronavirus tests, including at a massive driving site at Dodger Stadium, as health workers ran to contain the worst COVID-19 point of the USA
Now, county officials say evidence has almost collapsed. More than 180 government-supported positions operate at only one-third of their capacity.
“It’s shocking how quickly we’ve gone from going 100 miles per hour to about 25,” said Dr. Clemens Hong, who leads the county’s testing operation.
After a year of struggling to increase testing, communities across the country are seeing demand drop, closing test sites or even trying to return supplies.
The drop in screening comes at a significant time in the outbreak: experts are cautiously optimistic that COVID-19 will backfire after killing more than 500,000 people in the U.S., but worry that emerging variants could prolong the epidemic.
“Everyone is hoping to get fast, widespread vaccines, but I don’t think we’re at a time when we can let the guard go yet,” Hong said. “We just don’t have enough people who are immune to rule out another wave.”
U.S. tests peaked on Jan. 15, when the country averaged more than 2 million tests a day. Since then, the average number of daily tests has dropped by more than 28%. Falling mirrors have been declining in all major virus measures since January, including new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Officials say these encouraging trends, along with the harsh winter weather, the end of the holiday travel season, pandemic fatigue and a growing focus on vaccinations, are diminishing interest in testing.
“When you combine them all together, you see that decline,” said Dr. Richard Pescatore of the Delaware Department of Health, where daily tests have dropped more than 40 percent since the January peak. “People just aren’t going to try places.”
But testing remains important for outbreak monitoring and containment.
LA County opens up more testing options near public transportation, schools and offices to make it more convenient. And Santa Clara County officials are urging residents to “continue testing regularly,” highlighting new mobile test buses and emerging sites.
President Joe Biden has promised to renew the country’s testing system by investing billions more in government supplies and coordination. But with the rapid fall in demand, the country may soon have a range of unused supplies. The United States will be able to conduct nearly 1 billion monthly tests in June, according to researchers from Arizona State University researchers. It is more than 25 times the current rate in the country, of about 40 million reported tests per month.
With more than 150 million new doses of vaccine scheduled for delivery by the end of March, testing is likely to fall even further as local governments change staff and resources to make vaccines.
“You have to choose your battles here,” said Dr. Jeffrey Engel, of the State Council and Territorial Epidemiologists. “Everyone would agree that if you have a public health nurse, you would use that person to get vaccinated, not to get tested.”
Some experts say the country needs to duplicate tests to prevent outbreaks of coronavirus variants that have been imposed in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.
“We need to use the evidence to continue the downward trend,” said Dr. Jonathan Quick of the Rockefeller Foundation, who has been advising Biden officials. “We have to have it there to grab overvoltages from the variants.”
Last week, Minnesota began urging families to take the test every two weeks until the end of the school year as more students return to the classroom.
“To protect this progress, we need to use all the tools at our disposal,” said Dan Huff, assistant state health commissioner.
But some of the proponents of more vocal testing are less concerned about declines in detection. From a public health standpoint, testing is effective if it helps to quickly find infected people, track their contacts, and isolate them to stop the spread. In most parts of the US, this never happened.
During the holiday season, many Americans still had to wait days to receive test results, which made them useless. This led to fatigue testing and decreased interest, said Dr. Michael Mina of Harvard University.
“It doesn’t give you exactly immediate and rewarding feedback,” Mina said. “Thus, people’s willingness or interest in taking the test begins to wane.”
Still, U.S. test manufacturers continue to increase production, with another 110 million quick, home-based tests expected to hit the market next month.
Government officials have long taken on this growing arsenal of cheap 15-minute tests that would be used to regularly examine millions of students and teachers as they resume face-to-face classes. But recent guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not emphasize testing, as they describe it as an “additional layer” of protection, behind basic measures such as masking and social distancing.
Even without strong federal support, education leaders say testing programs will be important in gathering the public confidence needed to completely reopen schools, even in the fall when cases are expected to rise again.
“Schools have rightly wondered,‘ Is it worth squeezing the juice to establish a great testing effort? “Said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit organization that advises districts in more than 25 states.” Our message to the school systems we work with is, you will need them “.
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Associated Press writer Brian Melley in Los Angeles and AP data journalist Nicky Forster in New York contributed to this report.
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Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.