At-home COVID-19 tests are in scarce supply in Texas while public testing sites see a rise in demand

As of Dec. 19, Texas has administered 49.6 million tests for the coronavirus. We do not know the number of Texans who have gotten a test because some people are tested more than once. The state’s tally also does not include pending tests. The average number of tests reported over the past seven days shows how the situation has changed over time by de-emphasizing daily swings.

Yet that is exactly the confirmation that many Texans are looking for the rapid tests to provide.

“I just want to get tested because we’re all gathering for Christmas,” Rome said.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced a new plan to purchase 500 million rapid tests nationally, which would be available starting in January, along with a new website where people can request the at-home tests for free. The website would initially launch in New York City.

In the meantime, many free testing sites run by county and city governments in the state are seeing increases in demand. In Harris County, daily tests at its four testing sites increased from just 159 tests administered on Dec. 10 to 1,149 tests administered on Dec. 20.

At the free sites run by the city of Houston health department, tests conducted went from 5,202 during the week of Thanksgiving to 10,121 the week of Dec. 9 and 8,363 the week of Dec. 16, according to data provided by the city.

On a Tuesday afternoon, on El Paso’s eastside, dozens of people in vehicles waited in line to get tested for COVID-19 at a drive-thru testing site.

Julian Lopez, the COVID-19 testing manager, said the site has been open since August 2021. Before November, he said they were testing on average 250 to 300 people a day. But “from one day to the next” it jumped to 1,000 people, he said.

Ever since early November, the site began to average 700 to 1,000 people a day.

Local health officials insist they have been able to meet the influx of testing patients so far and test results have steadily come in within two to three days as typically advertised. But a spokesperson for DSHS said the state can’t help the out-of-stock stores.

“There have been well-documented shortages of at-home testing kits,” said spokesperson Chris Van Deusen. “But that is outside of our purview, and based on today’s announcement, the federal government appears to be working to address that.”

Despite assurances from local officials that they have the testing capacity, some Texans say they’ve avoided local sites because of concerns about long waits and inconsistent results.

Harris County resident Rorea Williams, 23, said their family refused to go to the local free testing site this week because of a previous experience in which they waited in line for hours, only to never receive the results. This time, the family went to a local urgent care to quickly get a rapid test, which ended up costing hundreds of dollars because insurance wouldn’t cover the tests.

“If you are showing symptoms, you’re sitting in a car running a fever for four plus hours,” Williams said. “[My mom] was like, ‘I don’t have that time to wait. I feel really sick. I need to be at home resting.’”

Williams’ current job requires a negative test if an employee has been exposed to the virus. Williams spent Tuesday morning traveling to multiple pharmacies to try to find a rapid at-home test without success.

“Every time it was a hassle, even in the beginning,” Williams said. “There hasn’t really been a good system of accessible, reliable health care if you’re scared you have COVID and you don’t have $100 lying around to go get rapid tested frequently.”

Meanwhile, many health officials are thinking about how to handle potential demand after the holiday season.

Jennifer Kiger, the COVID division director for Harris County Public Health, said that county officials had a conversation with federal officials Tuesday to increase the number of tests and staff available in the new year. Testing capacity among those sites currently totals 2,200 per day.

Jen Samp, a spokesperson for Austin Public Health, said the city has seen an increase in demand for testing and has expanded hours at its sites. She called the spike in demand a good thing.

“I’m glad we’re getting the word out that people need to test before gathering or test before traveling” for the holidays, Samp said. “We know that’s a very important way to stop the spread right now.”

In Tarrant County, Dr. Kenton Murthy, assistant director of the Tarrant County Health Authority, told the Tribune that demand has increased steadily there in recent days, but it has been manageable, which he attributes to five new testing sites that have opened since Thanksgiving.

“We’ve been in essentially what feels like a war in the last few years,” Murthy said, who stressed getting vaccinated even above testing and remained optimistic that the county could celebrate the holidays without increased COVID cases. “We just have to band together, do the right thing — still enjoy ourselves, still enjoy our families — and just follow those public health guidelines and measures and we will get out of the holiday hopefully unscathed.”

Yet Murthy said the county is still bracing for a surge in people getting tested after the holiday season, especially as omicron continues to ramp up. He said there have been discussions to open a mass testing site, but the county is waiting to see what case numbers look like at that point.

But Cervantes warned that any test, whether it’s a rapid antigen test or the more accurate PCR test, has the potential for a false negative result, another reason she warned against purely using test results to determine whether it’s safe to gather for holidays.

In west Houston, Clarice Thompson worried she was experiencing that exact issue.

On Tuesday, she sat in her car at a city-run testing site at a community civic center, waiting for a PCR test. Her daughter traveled home for the holidays from Washington, D.C., and started to show cold-like symptoms. Thompson decided to get a PCR test because she figured the city-run tests were more reliable.

“She took the at-home tests and it kept saying negative,” Thompson said. “We don’t know if we need to wear masks for Christmas, or what we’re going to do.”

Uriel García and Patrick Svitek contributed to this report. This story originally published by the Texas Tribune.