Say, About Those Brandon Home COVID Tests: They’ll Take About Three Years

Obviously, there are already home tests out there, but,here is how Team Brandon does it…

Biden admin touts $137M deal for COVID test strip factory - the company says it will take 3 years to build https://t.co/yIUOgGNDGr

— Paul Conner (@paconner) December 30, 2021

From the link

The Biden administration has signed a $137 million contract with a pharmaceutical company for the purpose of building a factory for COVID-19 test strip materials, a White House official confirmed to FOX Business on Wednesday.

But the new facility will not start churning out the materials for three years, according to the company. If the timeline is correct, the deal will not alleviate the administration’s scramble to make more tests available in the near future amid a lack of supply for Americans. The administration is under fire for reportedly rejecting a deal in October that would have strongly ramped up the supply of COVID tests.

The three-year timeline also signals that the administration expects the need for tens of millions of such tests per month into 2024 or 2025 and beyond.

Reuters first reported that the White House inked the agreement with MilliporeSigma, a subsidiary of German firm Merck KGaA, not be confused with U.S. company Merck & Co.

“The money will allow the company over three years to build a new facility to produce nitrocellulose membranes, the paper that displays test results, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,” the outlet reported. “That, in turn, will allow for 85 million more tests to be produced per month, the official said.”

The whole idea was to make home tests readily available quickly. Trump (and other world leaders) was able to get vaccines available in less than a year (OK, they act more like 6 month flu shots, same as other nations were able to do), and Biden can’t get large amounts of test strips going for three years.

But, hey, there’s a problem with all this home testing, too

(NY Times) Millions of rapid at-home COVID tests are flying off pharmacy shelves across the country, giving Americans an instant, if sometimes imperfect, read on whether they are infected with the coronavirus.

But the results are rarely reported to public health departments, exacerbating the long-standing challenges of maintaining an accurate count of cases at a time when the number of infections is surging because of the omicron variant.

At the minimum, the widespread availability of at-home tests is wreaking havoc with the accuracy of official positivity rates and case counts. At the other extreme, it is one factor making some public health experts raise a question that once would have been unthinkable: Do counts of coronavirus cases serve a useful purpose, and if not, should they be continued?

Whoops! Makes it rather hard to track how many positive tests there have been. How is there any tracking and tracing? Sadly, that is something that really was necessary early on, but, you can understand the resistance, but, it could have eliminated a lot of the spread.