Door-to-door coronavirus tests to be held in US cities to gauge outbreak scale as economy gears up to reopen
The testing capacity in the US is woefully short. To fill the gaps in testing capacity, a private company has rolled out a new program to enable door-to-door testing in five US cities.
New York, New Orleans, Reno, Las Vegas and Washington DC are currently on the list. Los Angeles will soon join them. The program by Ready Responders, a medical care company, could help understand the scale of the outbreak in the country. The company hopes the testing can prevent another wave of infections as some parts of the economy slowly reopen, reports NPR.
The New Orleans-based company has tasked its emergency medical technicians (EMT) with the responsibility of testing people and also educating them about the symptoms.
This mode of screening dubbed at-home testing, allows medical providers to pay attention to people who might not have had the chance to get themselves tested or treated, the company explained to NPR.
It has been only two weeks since the program took off in New York City, and the at-home testing is already in demand. "It has been pretty hectic," a 24-year-old EMT, Mayelyn Rojas told NPR. "I am doing a lot of COVID calls. It is insane how often these calls are coming and they're just, like, 'No one has tested us before.'"
Rojas has been in talks with New York residents, answering questions on the symptoms and checking if they need testing. She then connects residents showing one or more coronavirus symptoms with a doctor or a nurse through video conferencing tools. During the call, the medical experts decide whether the suspected patient needs a test or not.
If they order a test, Rojas and her colleagues head over to their homes, carrying personal protective equipment and testing materials with them. The EMTs then collect nasal swabs and parcel them over to a commercial lab. After about two to three days, the suspected patients receive their test results via text or an online portal.
The testing comes amid testing shortages in the country. The virus has sickened more than 1.1 million Americans and killed more than 66,000 people. Authorities have only screened over 6.7 million people so far.
The country should be running five million tests a day if it wants to reopen and ease restrictions, experts said. Though Trump administration claims there are no shortages, the US is still lagging.
“We need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests but the capacity to perform them,” Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Time magazine on April 23. “I am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that."
Ready Responder's program can also help researchers gauge the extent of infection. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has enabled door-to-door testing in Atlanta. The team is aiming to collect blood samples from residents and screen them for antibodies.
The blood samples and other data might help unlock information that could change the way the government responds to the outbreak, Jacqueline Tate, an epidemiologist working on an antibody survey of COVID-19, told Fox News.