“We haven’t done any advertising of any sort,” the company’s chief executive, Hugo Barra, said in an interview Friday. He said the company intends
“We haven’t done any advertising of any sort,” the company’s chief executive, Hugo Barra, said in an interview Friday. He said the company intends to scale up production so the cost of the tests falls.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who advised Mr. Biden during his transition, said the administration should simply purchase over-the-counter tests and distribute them to pharmacies, where they could be sold at a low cost or even given away.
“If you had central purchase by the government, you could drive the price way down, which is very important,” he said.
For now, the high cost of at-home tests is a huge barrier; in some states, including Massachusetts and Colorado, officials are distributing them free of charge. Yet some consumers have expressed unease about the at-home tests, fearing that they are not as reliable as P.C.R. tests.
“I would be more comfortable leaving it to professionals rather than myself,” said Fortune Maduba, 23, a grocery store worker in Houston who was preparing to travel to Nigeria.
In Providence on Friday, Silvi Goldstein, 28 and a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, was waiting to be tested at a state-run site outside the Rhode Island Convention Center. Staff members at the testing site said labs were overwhelmed, and Ms. Goldstein said she expected to wait 72 hours for her results — three times as long as she had to wait during the summer.
“I’ve considered at-home tests — they’re expensive,” Ms. Goldstein said.
According to a report this month by the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University, the United States has both the world’s highest rate of tests per capita and the worst Covid-19 outbreak. The worse the outbreak, the more tests are needed, the center said, but experts disagree about what rate of testing is sufficient.
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