Skyrocketing sales of at-home Covid-19 testing kits have led more people to learn their results outside clinical settings — potentially obscuring health departments’ full understanding of infection rates in their communities.
Unlike at clinics and doctors’ offices, which always log Covid test results with public health officials, if you take a test at home, it’s up to you whether you disclose the results to your local health department.
Local health officials say it’s not mandatory, but especially as the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads, they encourage people to report at-home test results.
Many health departments, from those in Tompkins County, New York, to Marin County, California, have set up simple forms for residents to complete. In Washington, D.C., in addition to a web portal, officials launched an iPhone feature on Christmas Eve to self-report positive results.
Jan. 27, 202101:09
“Whether it’s a PCR test that’s done through a laboratory or an antigen test that’s done at home, the disease is still the disease, so understanding what’s going on in the community helps us to understand do we need to dial things up or dial things down?” said Patrick Ashley, the senior deputy director of health emergency preparedness and response administration at DC Health, Washington’s health department.
In Tompkins County, which includes Ithaca, where there was an outbreak this month at Cornell University, reporting your test status is beneficial for the community, as well as for you, said Frank Kruppa, the county’s public health director.
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As soon as residents submit their positive results, “we want them to have as much information as possible,” so they get automated emails that include details about how to isolate safely while they are sick, as well as documentation for their employers or schools.
The county launched its self-reporting system Thursday afternoon, just in time for Christmas, when many people were expected to take tests at home before their holiday gatherings. Since then, the Tompkins County Health Department has received 81 reports of positive cases from home tests — which didn’t strike Kruppa as particularly high for a holiday weekend.
“We were expecting a high volume because of the holiday, and we’re actually hopeful, because that many people have found out they were positive and hopefully didn’t go to any family gatherings,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t specify that those who self-test for Covid report their results to local health departments. Instead, it recommends sharing positive results with health care providers, who will report the results. The CDC also recommends informing close contacts — defined as anyone you were less than 6 feet away from for 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period — of your positive result, whether it was from a home test or a lab test.
Dr. Robert Murphy, the executive director of the Institute for Global Health at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said calculating how many home tests go unreported is complicated.
Most people probably don’t report their home test results, he said, but many may go in for confirmation for second tests at clinics or take second tests later at clinics to be able to get out of isolation early, for example.
“I’m sure some slip through the cracks, but it’s not going to be an overwhelming number,” he said of the home tests.
Regardless, what’s most important is that those who are sick follow the same protocol, whether they test positive from lab tests or from home tests.
“Even if they were to not report it to us, we would hope that they would isolate from others until they are not contagious, because that’s what this is really about, is limiting spread in our community,” Kruppa said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
