Federal website for rapid tests goes live a day early

I went to get a coronavirus test after Thanksgiving, and the nurse took my temperature — 97.7 degrees Fahrenheit. This is not unusual for me, even though it was lower than what we think of as normal.

Normal body temperature is one health-related number that most everybody knows — 98.6 degrees. It’s even easier in Celsius — a flat 37 degrees.

Despite the exactitude of the widely accepted number, down to one-tenth of a degree, body temperature is not that fixed.

LEWISTON, Mich. — The conversation at the card table inside the Lewiston 50 Plus Club turned one recent afternoon to the coronavirus pandemic, as it had so many times the past two years.

Just days earlier, the club’s president — and one of its most devoted euchre players, Danny Burtch — died of the virus after weeks of suffering from covid-19.

Burtch was the 40th person claimed by covid-19 in sparsely populated Montmorency County, in the backwoods of northern Michigan. The grief has hit particularly hard at the 50 Plus Club, knocked down in so many ways during the pandemic. Members falling ill. Shutdowns causing the club to shutter. Staffers run ragged keeping the center safe for the vulnerable people who congregate inside its walls.

“It seems unfathomable,” said Randy Long, 67, the club’s vice president and a local radio host, clad in a Santa hat, his cards face down in front of him. “I’ve spent almost eight years with this guy … and for him to just be gone, taken away in less than four weeks by a virus, getting your head wrapped around that.”

A flood of covid patients causes ‘almost unmanageable’ strain in Michigan as cases rise nationwide

As health-care leaders pleaded with Michigan residents to take the virus seriously and to get vaccinated, Burtch was among several thousand mostly unvaccinated patients who flooded the state’s hospital wards during the fall and early winter. For weeks, Michigan led the country in covid-19 deaths, and the 71-year-old retired electrician, with no major health complications before contracting the virus, was among them.

Two years into the pandemic, the story of Danny Burtch is the story of incalculable loss and of hard choices: whether to be vaccinated, whether to leave the isolation of home for fellowship, whether to partake in a beloved game of cards.

D.C. public schools would be required to notify parents within 24 hours if any student in their child’s classroom tests positive for the coronavirus, under new legislation passed by the D.C. Council on Tuesday.

The emergency legislation, which heads to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) for her signature or veto, passed the council unanimously.

“Right now, schools are not able to get the information to parents quickly enough, because it has to go through sort of a long bureaucratic process, and we do have to cut that process down for the safety of our students and staff,” said Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), who introduced the bill and is running against Bowser in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary. He has criticized her management of the school system.

After Thanksgiving, D.C. schools saw a surge in coronavirus cases, leading several to temporarily shift to virtual instruction. Parents, teachers and staff members complained about a lack of communication from D.C. Public Schools, saying that case notifications to families did not include the total number of positive cases in the building and that sometimes the communication was delayed by two to three days.

D.C. Public Schools has previously said it would start notifying parents of the total number of cases and expedite the notifications.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday added Australia, Israel and 20 other nations to its list of countries at highest risk of coronavirus spread, urging people not to travel to the areas.

The CDC’s Level 4 denotes a “very high level” of the coronavirus, with more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents reported in the prior 28 days. The new entries dwarf last week’s two additions to that level.

Australia and Israel have maintained some of the strictest borders controls during much of the pandemic.

With an average of about 100,000 new cases a day, according to Our World in Data, Australia has one of the world’s sharpest spikes per capita. The omicron variant has fueled the country’s biggest coronavirus surges of the pandemic, leading to testing problems, vaccination cancellations and an hubbub over tennis star Novak Djokovic’s attempt to compete in the Australian Open without being vaccinated.

Israel, one of the first nations to widely vaccinate its population, has had a major rise in infections. Cases have increased by 32 percent this week, the Washington Post coronavirus tracker shows, and the nation is launching a campaign to provide second booster shots.

Also added to the “avoid travel” list were island destinations such as the Bahamas; Turks and Caicos; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; and Sint Maarten. The British Virgin Islands had the biggest move upward in the list — before being placed on the highest-risk category, it was at Level 1, or “low” risk, last week.

While these nations are reporting surges, the U.S. average of reported cases (723,997) and deaths (1,732) was among the highest in the world from Jan. 10 through Monday, according to The Post’s coronavirus tracker.

When 22-year-old student Mayra Herrera logged on to the federal website to get four free rapid at-home coronavirus tests, she encountered an error.

The Postal Service-run online form that soft-launched Tuesday told Herrera, who lives near the University of California at Berkeley campus, that someone else had registered her address — possibly one of the 10 other students living in the home. She got the same message others have who live in group or multifamily homes where there are more residents than the four allotted tests per household: “At-home COVID-19 tests have already been ordered for this address. Our records show that at-home COVID-19 tests have already been ordered for this address. We are unable to process duplicate orders for the same address.”

The White House said it set the four-test per household limit to make sure as many people as possible could get tests, but critics say it doesn’t give equal access to people who live in communal housing for economic or cultural reasons. Some people posted online about being unable to get tests to their apartment buildings. The Postal Service said in a statement that the issue impacted “a very limited cases of addresses that are not registered as multiunit buildings which could lead to COVID test kit ordering difficulties.”

But the Biden administration points to other ways to access free tests: People can buy up to eight tests per month and get reimbursed by their private insurance carriers or find them at community health centers, as well as targeted locations like schools and long-term care facilities.

Herrera says the free tests at Berkeley are the kind sent to labs, which take longer to process, Herrera said. If she could receive rapid tests through the Postal Service, the college student said she would be able to test herself before visiting a family or enjoying a concert.

“But I’m not able to get them, which is really upsetting and really concerning for my health and safety,” she said.

Maria Ferraguto, a Washington, D.C., resident, faced the same problem when her six-person household realized they would not be able to order tests for everyone. Yet Ferraguto said she realizes the limit is even more burdensome for her neighbors, many who are Black and Latin families in multigenerational households.

Families with multiple generations under one roof are disadvantaged by the four-test limit compared to single-family households, disproportionately hitting communities of color, said Ranak Trivedi, a researcher studying families and caregivers at Stanford University.

“It’s sort of this idea that there’d be a heteronormative family of four: a dad, mom and two kids who would need it,” Trivedi said. “Personally, I’m from India and I see a lot of my friends and family who are living in multigenerational households who are not a family of four and have it made me wonder how they would go about getting more than four tests if they needed them.”

As millions of Americans navigate life disrupted by the easily transmissible omicron variant, public officials are urging them to view at-home antigen tests as an important tool to stem the surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.

But the tests, which are designed to quickly tell a person if they’re infected, have become harder to find. In an effort to increase access, the federal government has launched a website where Americans can order free test kits.

At the same time, emerging research is raising concerns about the efficacy of some rapid antigen tests and their ability to detect omicron. Evaluations of performance are ongoing.

Rona MacInnes, 54, was determined to do everything possible to protect her elderly mother as her family prepared to gather for Christmas in Pennington, N.J.

With her son returning from study in Dublin, MacInnes hoped serial at-home coronavirus tests would catch a coronavirus infection he might bring home. The college junior would take six rapid tests before the holiday, all of which returned negative results. But it would become clear only later — after he had spent time with his grandmother — that he had been infected the whole time. Several days after gathering for Christmas, he got a positive result back from the first available lab-based PCR test he was able to book.

The result floored and frightened MacInnes, creating fresh worries about her 80-year-old mother. The family quickly booked an appointment to get a PCR test for her mother that came back negative.

The promise of at-home tests to tell people whether they are infectious has been undercut not just by anecdotal reports like MacInnes’s but also by preliminary data that suggests that some of the rapid tests may be less sensitive to the now-dominant omicron variant.

The federal agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid has set new deadlines for many health-care workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The deadlines apply in 24 states for which the Supreme Court last week revived an immunization requirement that had been blocked by lower court.

Under guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), health-care providers in the states back under the mandate must ensure that their employees have had at least one coronavirus shot by Feb. 14 and are fully vaccinated by March 15. A month later, the agency will be allowed to start taking action against facilities that do not comply.

Nationwide, the requirement affects an estimated 10 million health-care workers who are employed in places that treat Medicare and Medicaid patients and receive federal money from the vast public insurance programs. That includes hospitals, long-term care facilities, hospices, home-health agencies and other care providers.

The latest guidance does not affect the time frame for complying in 25 other states and the District of Columbia, where the vaccine rule had not been halted by lower courts. Health-care facilities and practices there must have their employees fully vaccinated by Feb. 28.

Because of a separate court injunction, Texas is the only state in which the mandate is not in effect, according to CMS.

The new guidance was issued Friday, the day after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed down an order that the health-worker mandate could be in effect while the high court continues to consider lawsuits challenging the rule. In another order, the court blocked a broader-reaching requirement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that would have compelled most workers in companies with at least 100 employees to get vaccines.