“We did not advertise in any way,” the company’s CEO Hugo Barra said in an interview on Friday. He said the company plans to scale up production so that the costs of the tests come down.
dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who advised Mr. Biden during his transition, said the administration should simply buy over-the-counter tests and distribute them to pharmacies, where they can be given at a low cost or even given away.
“If you had central government procurement, you could push the price down, which is very important,” he said.
For now, the high cost of home testing is a huge barrier; in some states, including Massachusetts and Colorado, officials distribute them for free. Still, some consumers have expressed unease about the home tests, fearing that they are not as reliable as PCR tests.
“I’d rather leave it to professionals than to myself,” said Fortune Maduba, 23, a Houston grocery store worker preparing to travel to Nigeria.
In Providence on Friday, Silvi Goldstein, 28 and a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, waited to be tested at a state-run site outside the Rhode Island Convention Center. Test site staff said the labs were overwhelmed, and Ms Goldstein said she expected to wait 72 hours for her results — three times as long as she had to wait during the summer.
“I’ve considered at-home tests — they’re expensive,” said Ms. Goldstein.
According to a report this month by the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University, the United States has both the world’s highest per capita testing rate and the worst Covid-19 outbreak. The worse the outbreak, the more tests are needed, the center said, but experts disagree on how many tests will be enough.