Almost a year ago, anxious crowds broke into Utah hospitals in hopes of being tested for coronavirus, while testing supplies were so scarce that health officials told Utahns not to even order a test unless they were extremely sick. .
The lack of widespread aggressive testing – with a flawed first federal test, regulations that delayed the launch of alternatives and other factors – probably cost Utah and the country a chance to control the virus last spring.
Now the tests are in the spotlight again – while Utah uses testing and screening to fight new outbreaks, while cases decrease and the number of vaccinated residents grows.
Governor Spencer Cox is asking the Utahns to take the test, whether they are sick or not. There are pop-up sites for rapid antigen testing each week in several counties, and at least some hospitals no longer require a doctor to be referred for the COVID-19 test. And the state is once again trying to get Utahns to subscribe to receive phone alerts that will notify users that someone with whom they have had a positive result.
Here’s what we know about the state’s renewed pressure for testing and what it means to you.
A few months ago, it was difficult to get a coronavirus test, even with my doctor; there are now “rapid antigen” test sites across the state. Who’s doing all these tests?
The state in early January began offering “fast antigen” tests during weekly one- and two-day clinics in dozens of locations around Utah. Most of these tests were conducted by the Utah Department of Health, in locations where Utah National Guard troops also work, said UDOH spokesman Tom Hudachko.
Other locations were run by Nomi Health, Orem’s health technology company that operates TestUtah under a contract with the state. Former governor Gary Herbert announced for the first time that TestUtah would run asymptomatic tests across the state beginning in September, when rapid tests became widely available. According to the test data obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune, TestUtah appears to have performed less than 1 in 10 of the coronavirus tests in Utah from September to January.
[Read more: Exclusive: TestUtah’s COVID-19 testing costs the state more than other sites, analysis shows]
Since the start of the pandemic, about 3.9 million coronavirus tests have been carried out in Utah, on about 2.2 million people. Most of the tests were done by healthcare systems, with around 1.1 million by Intermountain Healthcare and more than 400,000 by the University of Utah Health. TestUtah ran about 250,000 tests by the end of January, and teams from the Utah National Guard and UDOH ran about 290,000 by mid-February, Hudachko said.
Why is the state promoting more tests now, exactly when cases are decreasing? Should the tests have been more widespread when the cases were peaked in November?
The state launched antigen test sites in January to quickly identify outbreaks after holiday meetings, especially with the reopening of schools, Hudachko said – although he added that the test “has not become more, or less, central to the response. of State”.
“Testing as many people as possible has always been a key strategy, and it always will be,” he wrote by email. “… What has changed are the tactics available to us to achieve this strategy: rapid testing, mobile testing, school testing, community impulse testing, etc.”
When the pandemic started, state epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn noted that testing can be more advantageous when there are fewer cases, saying at the time: “The benefit of surveillance across the community is … you can really get an early sense of where the virus is at. “
And while testing is always crucial to ensure that those who are infected know how to isolate themselves, contact tracking can become less and less practical as more cases are confirmed. As the number of cases increased during the fall, some Utah health departments had to reduce contact tracking efforts, calling fewer contacts from each infected person and asking patients and employers to try to notify others who might be at risk.
“When a contact tracker gets about five new cases a day or more, it’s very difficult to control that,” said epidemiologist Annie George of Salt Lake County in October. “It gets to the point where it’s not effective because … it’s no use calling them after they’ve been out of quarantine for a while.”
So is Utah really testing more people now that it is offering the quick test to anyone who wants it?
No, but it appears to be identifying a significantly larger share of infected Utahns.
The number of coronavirus tests skyrocketed in late November, as the number of cases was also at its peak. In the week leading up to Thanksgiving Day, Utah was testing more than 25,000 people a day – and the test rose to that level again in early January, when students returned to school after the winter holidays. In the past few weeks, Utah has been doing an average of 15,000 tests a day.
However, the percentage of positive tests has decreased dramatically since the start of the rapid tests. The higher the percentage, the more likely it is that many cases go undetected and that infected Utahns carry and spread the virus unintentionally.
In early January, almost a third of all tests were positive; on Thursday, that number dropped to about 10%, even with thousands less people being tested each day.
This is still a far cry from the numbers that show that the tests have captured enough cases that the virus is probably not spreading undetected in the community. In June, when the positivity percentage was around 8%, Dunn said that a 3% rate would indicate “that we really have this under control”.
Tests have increased and decreased along with the number of cases, and with cases dropping in the past few weeks, “we have also seen the number of tests decrease,” said Hudachko.
But to prevent transmission in the community, Cox said, Utahns should not wait for symptoms to appear.
“We … really want to point out that testing is still the best way to identify positive cases so that people can isolate and stop transmitting the virus to others,” Cox said at a recent news conference. “… Please don’t hesitate to take the test.”