New York City Is Not Recording At Home Test Results

​​How Testing Has Evolved

When COVID first emerged the medical testing industry had to work quickly to develop a test to detect COVID. The PCR test was developed first. Results took a minimum of 24 hours to process. As COVID cases increased the demand for testing also increased. A huge burden was put on the healthcare systems for covid testing and treatment for those with positive results. Sometimes patients with symptoms or exposures would go days without testing because there were not enough tests or testing facilities available. Healthcare providers and patients wanted test results faster, so rapid testing came along. Even still there was still a demand for an easier way to test. COVID testing evolved quickly with the development of rapid tests and then home testing.

When Omicron emerged in the United States, testing again became increasingly difficult due to the volume of people needing testing. Many testing sites were overwhelmed and people were waiting hours or even days to get tested. Home testing kits were scarce because they were selling out so quickly. Since then home antigen tests have become more readily available and some states, organizations, or schools are giving free at-home tests out. Now you are even able to order a home testing from the comfort of your couch and receive the tests by mail. While home testing is very convenient and may be preventing the spread of covid, it makes tracking the results very difficult.

New York City COVID Tracking

New York City (NYC) has had a dramatic decrease in conventional testing due to home testing which has helped take some of the burdens off the healthcare systems. The issue with this is that there may be a lot of covid cases that are not being reported. NYC is one of the cities in the United States that is not tracking home testing results. While other cities such as Washington D.C. are tracking at-home testing results.

The city health department says that they don’t account for home test results because it may “muddy” the city’s record-keeping and tests could not be verified. They believe that their records are still accurate because there are still many people who go to healthcare facilities or labs to get tested. NYC’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene believes that the current data surveillance is accurately tracking covid cases and trends.

Benefits and Concerns of Recording at Home Testing Results

Tompkins County located in upstate New York has been accounting for residents reporting their at-home test results. It is estimated that they recorded an extra 25% of cases by allowing this. If compared to NYC which has five boroughs, another 250,000 COVID cases could have been recorded.

The largest concern of city health officials is about the reliability of home testing and people not reporting their results. They believe that the records would be inaccurate because they can’t keep track of how many people are testing and what the results are.

In Washington D.C., people have been reporting their results. They have had 60,000 negatives and 9,000 positive test results recorded from people who did at-home testing. Washington D.C. is also using home testing for schools and requiring those people to upload results. In order to keep their numbers accurate, they keep the results of at-home testing separate from testing done at healthcare sites.

One of the major concerns of home-testing covid cases not being recorded from an epidemiology standpoint is that it will make it more difficult to identify new variants. Jennifer Nuzzo from John Hopkins was stated saying “The biggest worry that I have is that we’re going to miss changes in the epidemiology of this virus because we’re losing that surveillance”. She supports home testing but is wary of blindspots in result reporting (Akpan, 2022).

If health officials continue to not require people to report their home test results, the surveillance may become similar to how flu surveillance is done. Flu surveillance is done by the Centers for Disease Control in 14 states and then those numbers are multiplied. It is then approximated how many flu cases and deaths there are. If this is how COVID will be tracked then it could possibly allow the virus to spread more.

Resources

https://gothamist.com/news/nycs-covid-testing-numbers-are-shrinking-faster-ever

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