There’s no excuse good enough to have let Florida’s warehouse of COVID tests expire | Editorial

HE COULD HAVE GIVEN THEM TO TEXAS

THEY NEED THEM😲



the Miami Herald Editorial Board
Mon, January 10, 2022, 

Florida allowed up to a million rapid COVID tests to expire in a warehouse, and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ excuses just don’t add up.

The DeSantis administration has said that the demand for tests fell off late in 2021. That’s true, as far as it goes. But demand came roaring back after Thanksgiving, when the omicron variant took hold. In Miami and other parts of the state, there were lines of cars snaking around parking lots. People waited for hours. Some ran out of gas. Store shelves were stripped of at-home test kits, with some big chains resorting to limits on the number we could buy.

That happened before the government’s tests expired in the final week of December.

So why didn’t the governor offer to distribute the tests to counties and cities back then? Open more testing sites, even? Or just, you know, make the issue public in case someone, somewhere, could use the tests before they expired?

State points fingers

Kevin Guthrie, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, tried some fancy footwork to explain the expired tests during a Jan. 6 press conference. He said the state had been waiting to see if the Food and Drug Administration and the company that makes the rapid tests, Abbott, would extend the expiration date by three months. He said the state had gotten a similar extension prior to that.

OK, fine. They asked for an extension and didn’t get an answer. But as the expiration date on the tests edged closer and closer, why didn’t the administration take action? If it had been monoclonal antibody treatment, which DeSantis has pushed relentlessly, we bet he would have been shouting it from the rooftops.

The blame-shifting and misdirection at the news conference continued. After Guthrie tried to say it was the federal government’s fault for not issuing another extension, DeSantis tried another tack. He pointed out that the Abbott tests required someone trained to administer them, and that at-home tests are better because they don’t require a trained person to use them.

Again, fine. But we didn’t imagine those lines for medical staff-administered tests at official Miami-Dade County sites in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Clearly, the need was there.

That brings us to politics. The expired tests came to light after Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democrat running for governor against DeSantis, started talking about them on social media. She accused the governor Dec. 30 on Twitter of stockpiling COVID tests that were about to expire, calling the situation either “negligent, or heartless.” It wasn’t until that Jan. 6 press conference that Desantis and Guthrie acknowledged that, actually, yes, they did have up to a million expired tests in a warehouse.
Less testing foolish

The backdrop to all of this is that the governor and his surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, recently started advocating for less COVID testing. Ladapo, with DeSantis at his side, said on Jan. 3 that it was time to “unwind the testing psychology” (though Miami roundly ignored him, with a record-breaking 70,236 COVID tests that day.) We’re not scientists, but if you test less, you’re going to find less COVID. In effect, you’ll be creating an artificially rosier picture of the infection level. We wonder whom that would help.

And driving home the administration’s odd reasoning, DeSantis’ spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw, tweeted on Jan. 6: “Think about it. Before COVID, did anyone go out and seek testing to determine if they were sick? @GovRonDeSantis,” Well, we thought about it and the answer is obvious. We get colonoscopies, we get mammograms, we get X-rays and eye exams — all in the name of prevention, all to make sure things are in good working order. We do our best not to get sick.

Pushaw wrote the Editorial Board Monday that the “governor/governor’s office is not the custodian of COVID tests. Managing the procurement and logistics of COVID tests has always fallen to the Department of Health and Division of Emergency Management.”

Nope, sorry, that doesn’t wash. Both of those agency chiefs answer to the governor.

She noted that the state will be sending a million at-home tests to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, apparently part of its new “low value” and “high value” testing strategy.

She also said it was a good thing that those tests were stockpiled, in case they were needed. The Division of Emergency Management, she wrote, “was over-prepared. It is a good thing that COVID cases were so low in Florida last fall that there wasn’t enough demand to use up the tests before they expired.”

We don’t have a quarrel with stockpiling tests for future use. And, yes, it is good that the demand was low in the fall. But by December, it was a vastly different story in Florida. And none of that explains why the state failed to act when the tests were getting close to expiration with no extension in sight.

Sitting on your hands while trying to blame the other guy isn’t a great look for a governor running for reelection. And it sure isn’t serving the people of Florida.