With the highly contagious variant of Omicron fueling a surge in coronavirus cases – as well as the demand for testing – Los Angeles County’s health officials have suspended a home testing program for residents as they grapple with a buildup of kits.
The program delivered free home nasal swab tests to residents with COVID-19 symptoms or to those who had known exposure, according to the LA County Department of Health Services.
Health officials temporarily stopped the program on Wednesday, citing “a current backlog in the logistics of processing these kits,” the health department said in an email.
A limit of 4,000 home test kits per day has been put in place to ensure kits are sent, received and processed on time, ”the department said.
It’s not clear when the program will resume, but department officials said an announcement will be posted on the website as soon as it becomes available. Meanwhile, the health service said it would be announcing details on a new program next week.
The new program will allow LA Counties to pick up and drop off tests at designated locations, which will allow us to “increase capacity and continue to meet current demand,” a health service statement said.
Under the current program, Fulgent Genetics is shipping test kits along with a prepaid overnight shipping envelope to those who qualify through FedEx. Residents are instructed to take a sample from their nose, package it and either arrange for a FedEx pickup or drop it off at a laboratory. The results will be sent within 48 hours.
The original program was billed as a “holiday test” in the health service’s website address, and what started as a temporary service in 2020 was restarted over the past Christmas period to meet increasing demand, according to reports from KTLA-TV .
With the spread of Omicron, the demand for tests has increased.
The rush has resulted in a shortage of home tests, which has led some pharmacies and stores to limit the number of tests each customer can buy.
Long lines and frustration have also become normal at many test sites.
“Unfortunately, with the national shortage of COVID testing and the incredibly high demand for local testing, long waits are now common,” Terry Kanakri, a spokesman for the Kaiser Permanente region of Southern California, said in a recent statement.
In the past seven days, about 23% of the 464,849 tests done in Los Angeles County have returned positive results, according to The Times-Tracker.
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