Covid-19 Test Distribution Plans Put More Pressure on U.S. Supply

“I’m thrilled that the administration is doing this, but where are the tests coming from?” said Sara Citrenbaum, co-director of the volunteer advocacy group Rapid Tests.

The administration has completed contracts for 420 million tests, administration officials said Friday. Starting Jan. 19, officials said, people will be able to order the first of the 1 billion rapid tests. People will be able order up to four tests per household on covidtests.gov that will be shipped within seven to 12 days.

The Biden administration had secured 50 million at-home, rapid tests as of Wednesday, said Dawn O’Connell, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “We worked with warehouses to see where additional tests were stored,” Ms. O’Connell said at a Senate hearing.

The federal government on Thursday announced contracts with three rapid-test makers, Abbott Rapid Dx North America LLC, iHealth Lab Inc., and Roche Diagnostics Corp., for a total of 380 million over-the-counter tests. The contracts have estimated completion dates of March 14, according to the Defense Department.

Officials said the administration would be able to keep up with the promised timeline. They said 375 million rapid Covid-19 tests would be on the market in January in addition to tests the federal government is purchasing and distributing.

An Abbott Laboratories spokeswoman said the company plans to make 70 million BinaxNow tests in the U.S. in January and to reach output of 100 million a month by March.

“We’ve got plenty of capacity to support U.S. demand and international demand,” Abbott Chief Executive Officer Robert Ford said at an investor conference Tuesday. “And I think you’re seeing, also, even more companies ramp up their manufacturing.”

The U.S. has an estimated capacity of 260 million rapid antigen tests this month, according to a Jan. 12 report from researchers at Arizona State University and Health Catalysts Group, a consulting firm. They used publicly available information to forecast that monthly capacity would increase to 355 million tests in February and 526 million tests in March.

Many test manufacturers are currently “on allocation,” meaning that everything that they are producing has been designated to a specific customer before it is fully manufactured, the report said.

But the additional demand spurred by the Biden administration might cause manufacturers to further scale-up production, said Mara Aspinall, co-founder of the Biomedical Diagnostics program at Arizona State University, who tracks the Covid-19 testing market and is a board member of the rapid-test maker OraSure Technologies Inc.

It might take some time to catch up, said Bernstein analyst Lee Hambright: “It’s going to be hard to meet that demand, hard to get there quickly.”

There are about a dozen companies with authorization in the U.S. to sell over-the-counter, at-home antigen tests, which hunt for pieces of virus protein and include brands like Flowflex and QuickVue in addition to Abbott’s BinaxNow. There are also a handful of companies with authorization for PCR-like, over-the-counter tests.

A spokeswoman for Quidel Corp. , which makes the QuickVue test, said the company has provided millions of at-home Covid-19 tests to the federal government and is increasing production at its factory in Carlsbad, Calif.

Two large over-the-counter antigen test manufacturers, Siemens Healthineers and SD Biosensor Inc. which joined with diagnostics giant Roche, got their authorizations in December and are expected to help boost rapid test supplies.

Siemens Healthineers is making millions of rapid tests available to U.S. customers and is working to distribute them through the federal and state governments, large health systems and at retail, a spokeswoman said. Roche will provide tens of millions of tests a month, with initial deliveries arriving in the U.S. later this month, a spokeswoman said.

iHealth is making around 200 million tests a month and it expects to double that output in February, a spokeswoman said.

Another diagnostics company, LumiraDx, plans to launch an at-home Covid-19 test in the second quarter, with capacity to produce about 300 million a month.

—Renée Onque contributed to this article.

Write to Brianna Abbott at [email protected] and Peter Loftus at [email protected]