WASHINGTON (AP) – Just five weeks ago, Los Angeles County conducted more than 350,000 weekly coronavirus tests, including at a massive drive-thru site in Dodger Stadium, as health workers rushed to the worst COVID-19 hotspot in the US
Now provincial officials say the testing has nearly collapsed. More than 180 government-aided sites use only a third of their capacity.
“It’s shocking how quickly we’ve gone from moving at 100 miles per hour to about 25,” said Dr. Clemens Hong, who is leading the province’s testing operation.
After a year of struggling to boost testing, communities across the country are seeing demand drop, testing sites closing, or even trying to return supplies.
The drop in screening comes at an important time during the outbreak: Experts are cautiously optimistic that COVID-19 is declining after killing more than 500,000 people in the US, but are concerned that emerging variants could extend the epidemic.
“Everyone is hoping for fast, widespread vaccinations, but I don’t think we’ve gotten to a point where we can drop our guard,” said Hong. “We just don’t have enough immune people to rule out another wave.”
US tests peaked on January 15, when the country performed an average of more than 2 million tests per day. Since then, the average number of daily tests has fallen by more than 28%. The drop mirrors are decreasing on all major virus measures since January, including new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Officials say these encouraging trends, along with harsh winter weather, the end of the holiday travel season, pandemic fatigue and a growing focus on vaccinations, are undermining interest in testing.
“If you put all of these factors together, you see this decrease,” said Dr. Richard Pescatore of the Delaware health department, where daily testing is down more than 40% since its peak in January. “People just don’t go to test sites.”
But testing remains important for outbreak tracking and control.
LA County is opening more testing options near public transportation, schools and offices to make it easier. And officials in Santa Clara County are urging residents to “continue to be tested regularly,” with an emphasis on new mobile test buses and pop-up sites.
President Joe Biden has pledged to overhaul the nation’s testing system by investing billions more in supplies and government coordination. But with demand falling rapidly, the country could soon have an abundance of unused supplies. According to projections by researchers at Arizona State University, the US will be able to conduct nearly 1 billion monthly tests by June. That’s more than 25 times the current number of about 40 million reported tests per month in the country.
With more than 150 million new vaccine doses due to be delivered by the end of March, testing is likely to decline further as local governments shift staff and resources to giving injections.
“You have to choose your fight here,” said Dr. Jeffrey Engel of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “Everyone agrees that if you have one public health nurse, you’re going to use that person for vaccination, not testing.”
Some experts say the country needs to double back in testing to avoid flare-ups of coronavirus variants that have occurred in the UK, South Africa and other places.
“We need to use testing to continue the downtrend,” said Dr. Jonathan Quick of the Rockefeller Foundation, who advised Biden officials. “We have to have it there to absorb peaks of the variants.”
Last week, Minnesota began urging families to get tested every two weeks until the end of the school year as more students return to class.
“To protect this progress, we need to use all the tools we have at our disposal,” said Dan Huff, an assistant health commissioner.
But some of the most vocal proponents of testing are less concerned about the decline in screening. From a public health point of view, testing is effective if it helps to quickly find the infected, track their contacts and isolate them to stop the spread. In most parts of the US, that never happened.
During the holiday season, many Americans still had to wait days to receive test results, rendering them largely unusable. That has led to fatigue testing and declining interest, said Dr. Michael Mina from Harvard University.
“It doesn’t really give you much satisfying immediate feedback,” Mina said. “So people’s willingness or interest to be tested is starting to wane.”
Still, US test makers are continuing to ramp up production, with an additional 110 million rapid and home-based tests expected to hit the market next month.
Government officials have long assumed that this growing arsenal of inexpensive 15-minute tests would be used to regularly screen millions of students and teachers as in-person classes resume. But recent guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put no emphasis on testing, describing it as an “extra layer of protection” behind basic measures such as masking and social distancing.
Even without strong federal backing, education leaders say testing programs will be important in building the public confidence needed to fully reopen schools, including in the fall when cases are expected to pick up again.
“Schools have rightly asked themselves, ‘Is the juice worth putting in a major testing effort?’” Said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit that serves districts in more than 25 states advises. “Our message to the school systems we work with is, ‘Yes, you have to pass extensive testing because you will need it.”
Associated Press writer Brian Melley in Los Angeles and AP data journalist Nicky Forster in New York contributed to this report.
Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.