DALLAS, Texas (KRLD) — Federal funding for testing is drying up and testing sites could be shutting down. That would make getting a PCR test more difficult. It would also mean we won't know which variants are circulating.
Epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Troisi with the UT School of Public Health in Houston says with testing sites shutting down and people will rely on the less sensitive, at-home Antigen test.
"Most people, I would think 99.9% of people who test positive at home are not going to report that to a public health agency. In fact, my grandson, three years old, just tested positive in Austin. They're not reporting it. Most people don't know how to report it. What that means is we don't have a good sense of what's going on in the community."
She notes Covid mutates faster than the flu. "We've never seen a virus that's mutating as fast as SARS COV2."
She says we are lucky that we have not had a variant that causes more severe disease. And notes while cases are down, but there's no guarantee they'll stay down.
She says a little more than two years ago, when we hardly had any tests at all, we could not tell what was happening in the community. "Testing is the eyes of the epidemiologist. If the results aren't reported it's sort of the same thing."
The current dominant strain is BA.2. It's an offshoot of and slightly more contagious than the Omicron variant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"With the highly infectious BA.2 subvariant circulating and residents traveling and gathering for Spring Break and Spring holidays, there is increased risk of virus transmission," Barbara Ferrer, the director of Los Angeles Public Health, said in a statement Wednesday.
"If we take sensible safety measures [like indoor masking and testing for COVID-19], we each have an ability to better protect ourselves and others from becoming infected with this more easily transmissible variant, BA.2."
Wednesday the Department of Public Health reported 973 new COVID-19 cases, 256 hospitalizations and 11 new deaths. To date, more than 31,800 Angelenos have lost their lives to the virus.
While BA.2 is currently believed to be the dominant strain in L.A. County, there are reports of a new strain circulating in the United States. That strain, called "Omicron XE" is a combination of the original Omicron variant and its BA.2 subvariant, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
The variant was first seen in the United Kingdom and has since been reported in Japan, Wisconsin, New York, and Texas.
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