By Richard Knox
My grandson Max is very cranked about Christmas. He was mightily impressed the other day when Santa took time out of his busy schedule to drop in on a classmate’s birthday party.
Max and his parents live in Massachusetts. It’s important to us that our daughter and son-in-law feel OK about bringing him and his 3-month-old sister up to New Hampshire for the holiday. How many more chances will we get to see Christmas through five-year-old eyes?
But at this Christmas-in-the-time-of-COVID, it has come to pass that the Granite State leads the nation in cases per 100,000 residents. That’s made Max’s parents understandably wary.
So…how can we make Christmas work?
We think we have it figured out, thanks to two new developments that may just lead all of us toward the end of the COVID tunnel in the months ahead.
First, there’s the recently expanded availability of COVID vaccines. Everybody over five years old can get vaccinated now, and everybody over 16 can get boosted. Second, we can now get “rapid antigen” COVID tests to use at home. That adds up to a strategy.
My family has made sure we’re all triply immunized against the virus (except for Max, who’s had two shots). That took a bit of doing. Max’s mother found that the queue for booster shots stretches into January at Massachusetts pharmacies as far west as Worcester.
When I tried to find her a slot in southern New Hampshire (this is legal), I discovered some “available” vaccination appointments on particular dates at particular times were really…not. A spokesman for one drugstore chain told me it was a computer glitch that’s being rectified. Meanwhile, with persistence she eventually scored a booster appointment in the Boston area.
Vaccinated-up as we will be, my family also decided to grab some of those new at-home rapid antigen tests. We’ll all test at home before we gather, hoping for negativity. We can retest if anyone gets exposed or becomes symptomatic and again after returning home.
We hope to compile enough tests in time. That will also take some doing. But Granite Staters are ahead in this game because on November 29 New Hampshire became the first state to offer free home test kits, thanks to a federal grant.
The response was overwhelming. Almost a million test kits were snapped up within 24 hours. Clearly, many Granite Staters are grasping for a tool that allows them to feel more secure – something they can do for themselves that doesn’t require the patience of Job and the ability to vault over roadblocks.
Today Governor Sununu announced at his weekly COVID news conference that within the next week the state is planning to send out another 100,000 or 150,000 free test kits. Later he promised “at least another half-million” test kits, “maybe more…We’re going to keep doing it.”
Since the surge of COVID cases is expected to continue into next month, more test kits will be needed. The state hopes the federal government will continue to pay for it, but “if we have to pay for it ourselves, we have funds and we’ll do it,” one state official said.
“Some folks in Washington pushed back a little bit,” the governor said, “but at the end of the day, this is the future of managing the COVID pandemic.”
State officials believe the free tests will more than pay for themselves because people can know early on if they’re COVID-infected and quarantine themselves to prevent onward transmission.
The rapid test kits are not perfect. As the state moves ahead with sending out more of them, officials need to do a much better job of explaining how to use them and interpret the results.
The tests are very good at identifying if someone truly has COVID. If they develop symptoms they can seek early treatment to keep them out of hospitals. Monoclonal antibody therapy is proven to work and the FDA may soon authorize new anti-COVID pills.
However, as one infectious disease doctor explained to me, a negative test result doesn’t necessarily mean you’re truly free of infection. The bottom line, he said, is that a negative result offers an additional degree of assurance. If you and your loved ones are fully vaccinated, have negative test results, and have been careful to avoid exposure in your daily rounds, it’s probably safe to get together.
This two-pronged strategy – more widespread vaccination and ramping-up of home testing – will only work if the vaccines and tests are readily available. The state is adding more mobile vaccine vans and community vaccine clinics. But pharmacies are the main vaccine access points.
When I surfed drugstores online recently and called around to check availability, I was offered appointments in mid-January. If you ask, the pharmacist might tip you off to walk-in vaccination opportunities during restricted hours. But many people might not find that out, or be able to get off work to take advantage of it.
Availability of home tests will also need to keep up with demand, beyond the next half-million kits. The free offer is important. Most drugstores are charging $24 for a two-test kit, which will deter many from accessing them in the first place. And the cost of repeated testing adds up fast.
But if access problems can be overcome, this road map can enable all of us come out of this second COVID winter with a sense of collective purpose and willingness to use the tools at hand. That would be a turning point in this long pandemic slog. And as omicron and future variants emerge, we’ll know what to do.
Richard Knox is a writer who lives in Sandwich. He has reported on medicine and public health for NPR and The Boston Globe.