TEXAS — Stephanie Gomez of Houston got a notification she was exposed to COVID and spent days looking for an open time slot at a pharmacy to get tested or an at-home kit she could buy to test herself.
“I was appalled at how difficult they were to find,” Gomez told Capital Tonight. “What’s appalling is just how abandoned I felt. As a Texan, and as an American, that this has just somehow become entirely like an individual problem. On top of that, it's just going to be difficult to find at-home tests.”
On Nov. 28, the seven-day average positivity rate in Texas was 4%. A month later and it has quintupled, surpassing 22%. The case rate is calculated by dividing the average of confirmed cases by the average of molecular tests conducted over the last seven days.
A cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s plan to combat the winter surge of coronavirus cases fueled by the omicron variant is more testing.
“We went from no over-the-counter tests in January to 46 million in October, 100 million in November, and almost 200 million in December,” Biden said earlier this week. “But it’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough. If (we) had known, we would have gone harder, quicker if we could have.”
RELATED: As omicron outpaces demand for rapid tests, Biden admin. working out purchase of millions
Last week, he announced his administration will distribute a half-billion free rapid COVID tests to the public, but those tests will not be distributed until after the holidays.
“Bottom line, it's a lot better than it was. We're taking more steps to make it easier to get tested and get tested for free,” Biden said when the White House announced the renewed efforts.
The administration is spending $3 billion to increase the number of at-home tests. The 500 million at-home tests will be shipped free to Americans who request them starting in January. By then all private health insurers will be required to reimburse people who buy over-the-counter tests, and the White House said they will provide access to free tests for those who do not have insurance. There will also be new federal testing sites across the country and the president has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up pop-up sites in areas with high demand.
“We need to pivot from an all-hands-on-deck, terrified state to how do we continue to live with this virus?” said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, a member of the Texas Medical Association COVID-19 Task Force. “The message continues to have to be if you're not vaccinated, get vaccinated. If you're vaccinated and you're due for a booster or the third shot of this series, I think it's really important for people to take that on, especially if you're in a risk category.”
When it comes to testing, Alozie said he believes the administration is now getting closer to the right track because testing allows people to prevent transmissions in a “honest and open way.”
“The president's announcement is overdue,” he said. “They took the wrong approach to this for far too long. We should have been doing this the way they do it in Europe where you go and get tests for free at any point in time. To me it was sort of logistic nightmare to tell people, yes, go buy it and then get paid back by your insurance company.”
The president argues the administration did not take long to ramp up testing.
“What happened was the omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought,” Biden told reporters last week when pressed on why Americans were having difficulty getting tests.
Still, the message about getting vaccinated and boosted and if people are eligible remains.
As for Gomez, she finally found an at-home kit 45 minutes from her home. She was surprised by the nearly $30 price tag, looked at how countries like Germany and South Korea provide free, mass testing and wonders why the U.S. cannot do the same.
“We just keep allowing the crisis to happen and then trying to respond and constantly playing catch-up instead of being proactive,” Gomez said.