On Jan. 18, the day the federal government’s website allowing Americans to order free at-home COVID tests opened (one day before its official launch, and the only time anything in this story happens ahead of schedule), we requested ours. At 1:44 p.m. came the U.S.P.S. order confirmation email, which added: “At home COVID-19 tests will ship free starting in late January.”
Our bubble-wrap envelope arrived Wednesday, one day after it was mailed from Jersey City. That’s 36 calendar days and 24 workdays later. Or, measured in pandemic time, eternity.
It was Dec. 21 when President Joe Biden, warning about the omicron hill we had to climb, first announced the feds would be mailing out 500 million free at-home tests. On that day, the U.S. registered 194,000 new COVID cases. About three weeks later, on Jan. 14 — a day with 933,000 new cases — the president said the tests were coming soon. In a fact sheet that day, the White House said “tests will typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering” (clarifying those “typical shipment times,” a senior administration official said “we hope that those and we anticipate those will shorten as we ramp up this program”). By the day our two little boxes arrived, there were 84,000 positive COVID tests nationwide; the omicron surge was in the rearview.
They say success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. In this case, either the test producers just weren’t able to churn them out in the numbers Biden promised — even though that same senior administration official boasted that “starting as early as last February, the administration has used the Defense Production Act, industrial mobilization, as well as $3 billion in advance purchase commitments to ramp up supply of testing, including at-home rapid tests.” Or maybe the kits were bought but sat in warehouses too long before getting sorted to their destination.
We don’t know who botched this, but we do know where the buck stops.