Biden bets on rapid COVID tests but they can be hard to find

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is betting on millions more rapid, at-home tests to help curb the latest deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is overloading hospitals and threatening to shutter classrooms around the country.

But the tests have already disappeared from pharmacy shelves in many parts of the U.S., and manufacturers warn it will take them weeks to ramp up production, after scaling it back amid plummeting demand over the summer.

The latest shortage is another painful reminder that the U.S. has yet to successfully manage its COVID-19 testing arsenal, let alone deploy it in the type of systematic way needed to quickly crush outbreaks in schools, workplaces and communities.

Experts say encouraging signs last spring led to false confidence about the shrinking role for tests: falling case numbers, rising vaccination rates and guidance from health officials that vaccinated people could largely skip testing. Officials recently reversed that advice as cases and deaths driven by the delta variant surged anew.

“For all of us, there was a combination of optimism and hubris in the June timeframe that led us believe this was over,” said Mara Aspinall, a health industry researcher at Arizona State University who has become a leading authority on COVID-19 testing supplies.

Colorado’s Mesa County is among the local governments that have stopped offering rapid tests as part of their free testing programs for the general public.

“We were seeing shortages in the tests across the county, so we are really prioritizing supplies for our school districts to have quick turnaround for testing, to help them if needed,” said Stefany Busch, a county spokeswoman. She noted that tests that are processed in laboratories — which take longer to give results — remain...