It's Friday August. I'm Oscar Emrrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. As the Delta baron continues to infect so many people, the demand for at home COVID test is going up. The only problem with that is that the test manufacturers can't keep up and they're becoming harder to find online and on pharmacy shelves. These antigen tests have faced questions of reliability, but work best on people who are shedding lots of
IRUs particles and provide quick test results. Brianna Abbott, health reporter at The Wall Street Journal, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Brianna, thanks for having me so something we had kind of forgotten about a little bit.
The demand definitely was dropping was for COVID test at home COVID test, but as the Delta variant has been surging, the need for these tests has become more clear and right now, unfortunately, the makers of these at home tests are having a tough time keeping up with that demand. So we're looking at the laboratories Quadell, Core and a couple of other ones that are really starting to ramp up the production of these tests again, So Brandon, help us walk through some of this. What are we seeing?
So you are spot on when you say that a lot of people forgot about COVID testing, and um, what we sort of saw in the late spring and early summer was testing demand really plummeted. For a few different reasons.
We had federal guidance that said that vaccinated people didn't really need to get tested anymore and less they had symptoms, and you had a lot more vaccinated people and cases were dropping, and so you know, there just wasn't as much demands for testing, and as a results, some of the companies, including Abbott, scaled down some of their production. They say that they were sort of forced to scale
back given the lack of demand. And now that we've seen things swing in the opposite direction, including cases surging, the notion that vaccinated people can and do sometimes spread the virus, and you know, just the overall worsening of the pandemic, kids going back to school, you're really seeing that demand take off again. And as a result, you are seeing some of the manufacturers sort of rushing to
keep up. Some of them never really ramped down, but even those who did or did not everybody is sort of rushing to keep pain with the demand. Yeah, I mean it was just a huge shift. The focus was on vaccinations and as you mentioned, cases were dropping, so even some of these testing centers converted into vaccination centers. So you know, it was that huge ship that we were going through. Well, we're talking about specifically so people
get the right frame of mind. We're talking about these at home antigin tests, so we're not talking about the PCR test. So if you can brand help us walk through some of you know, the major players in there. As I mentioned Abbott Laboratories, There's is called by x
Now and a few other names out there. So when it comes to the at home antigen tests, a lot of these weren't authorized for over the counter pharmacy drug store youth until like March or April, so this was the first third where we really had them available like
on pharmacy shell just for anybody to buy. And so we have sort of three main antigen tests, which is the binex Now from Abbott Laboratories, There's the Pudel puts view from Fudels Corp. And then there's the Aloom at home tests from the company Aloom and then there's also at home molecular tests like sort of like at home pc are that use slightly different technologies. There's one FLoC here of health, but those are sort of even the
harder to find than the antigeny want. There's always been a conversation about the reliability of these antigen tests, these rapid tests. Sometimes there's false positives or false negatives even but you know, experts do say that they kind of work when you're using them in succession, you know, maybe three tests in a row, something like that. I think they call them them they call them contagiousness tests because
it helps kind of track that a little bit better. Definitely, So with antigen tests, they're different than the molecular tests, which you know, hunt for the viruses genetic material and sort of amplify it, and so there's no amplification process with these antigen tests that look for bits of virus proteins, and so they are a bit less sensitive, and so you're gonna have them miss some more cases, might be a couple of false positives, but they are concerned is
false negative. But all of the data that we have show that these ancient and tests they work well when viral loads are pretty high, and so if you're just shedding virus all over the place and you're incredibly contagious, the test will pick you up, but they miss sort of those lower rung if you don't if you're not carrying a lot of virus at that time, they might miss it. And so they work best when when viral
loads are high. And so the whole idea is using them in rapid succession is that the amount of virus in your body like changes over the course of an infection, and so if you don't have a lot of virus in the beginning, the test might miss it, but two days later, your viral load could shoot up and then the test would pick it up. And so that's why you know, you might want to use multiple tests in
a row. And both the Abbot and the Quiddel tests are authorized for screening, and so if you're screening without symptoms, you're really supposed to take two of them over the course of a couple of days. Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally, speaking for myself, I've I've haven't spoken about tests so much as in the recent past that you know, I've had a couple of coworkers unfortunately came down with COVID.
They would both breakthrough infections also, but the same thing talking about the timing of tests are like, well, you know I might have been exposed, I gotta wait a couple of days just to make sure the test will pick it up. You know, there's so much that goes into it costs for these tests? How much did they cost?
And you know, because you know, to buy at home tests can get pretty expensive, it seems like, so these at home tests, the cheapest runs run for a two pack of twenty or self it's roughly ten dollars for tests, but you have to buy two of them, so it's essentially twenty dollars. And um, that's okay if you want to use it as like a one time screening thing or you have symptoms, we really need an answer now.
But for just something like regular screening, like most people aren't going to be able to afford to sort of constantly by worth of test. So there there has been public health experts that have sort of really been saying that if we really want widespread use of these as you know, frequent screening tools, the price is going to have to come down. Well, there's many ways and and options available to get tested. This is just one of them, the at home tests. I did check Amazon before we
came onto this interview. It is currently unavailable and it says they have no idea when they're coming back, So just something to keep an eye out for when you're out there. Brianna Abbott, health reporter at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America.
Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast