Home tests for COVID: negative

Albertsons pharmacy: "I don't think we have any."

Fred Meyer pharmacy: "Sorry, we don't carry them."

Walgreens pharmacy: "One to a customer."

Walmart pharmacy: "I think we have three kits left in the store."

Finding a home test kit was hard. The test was easy.

Stopping COVID has multiple tools--vaccinations, masking, distancing, business slowdowns and closures, therapeutics for the infected, and separation of the infected from others. For isolation to work, people need to know when they are infected. A reliable, available, affordable home test is part of the system, and that part isn't working.

The test kit available at Walgreens was $10, with one test. I found two test kits at Walmart because they were mis-shelved and hidden behind other items. The boxes had two tests and sold for $12. I took two, leaving one for the person standing behind me. The quarter on this and other photographs is there to show sizes.

Walmart's kit

I can afford the tests, but they are not priced for working families doing routine, prophylactic testing. That is a problem. Some of the therapeutics only work when the infection is new, so early diagnosis is critical. People only know to isolate if they know they are infected.

Availability is a problem, too. I will try Costco later this morning, but I am uncomfortable with Costco because it gets crowded and so many scofflaws take off their masks after passing through the entry door. I presume that people who ignore mask requirements are also likely to be among the 40% of local adults who refuse vaccinations. I will go just as the store opens, shop fast, and leave, while wearing a K-95 mask. Ideally I will do a home test for every member of my household twice this week, what with the holiday visiting taking place, but that would be eight tests. Possibly Costco will have them in bulk.

I used the Walgreen's test kit, shown below. 

The test was easy to take, in large part because the instructions included both simple drawings and clear text in both English and Spanish.

The kit was manufactured in China. This was inserted in the box:

The instructions tell one to open the sealed packet, remove the seal on the funnel that contained a reagent and to remove a swab, holding it by the stick end. It instructs one to twirl the swab in each nostril for 15 seconds each, then insert the swab into the reagent. 

One then twirls the swab in the liquid at the bottom of the plastic funnel one had inserted into the perforated hole in the box to hold it upright. 

Then one puts four drops of the liquid into the little square hole marked "S"  in the little analyzer tool that was in the kit. The tool is three inches long.

Shortly after inserting the drops, the color of the upper rectangle marked with the "C" and the "T" changes color temporarily. This is welcome feedback, acknowledging that presumably something is being analyzed.

We are instructed to wait 15 minutes. If the test were positive, then a red line would appear next to the "T" and if it were negative then no line would appear.  The photo above is my test result: No second line.

I would have preferred a negative test result to have caused some active visible change to the analyzer tool, an affirmative consequence of a negative test, but in this test one is asked to assume that no news is good news. That is a design flaw. "No change" could be the result of  a flawed test. Still, I will trust that. What choice do I have?

That is it. No great drama. The tests are simple, and now that I have done one, subsequent tests with this kit would be very easy. America still has a problem, though. If home testing to allow early diagnosis, early isolation, and early treatment with new therapeutics, is to be effective, then test kits need to be available and affordable, so people can use them freely. Two years into the pandemic and we aren't there yet. That is crazy. That would be a very fair criticism of the Biden administration. We should have big stacks of test kits, available for a token price, in grocery stores and pharmacies all across America.