RELATED: This Household Essential Is Disappearing From Grocery Store Shelves. If you’re looking for at-home COVID tests, you may have a hard time finding them both in stores and online right now. According to an investigation from Newsy, there is a shortage of these tests as a result of the U.S. failing to develop a market for home tests big enough to handle the spike in demand that the Delta variant has brought on. “Right now with Delta is the first time you actually see any demand for these tests,” Sara Citrenbaum, a research specialist at rapidtests.org, told Newsy. “Last year we couldn’t convince places for the life of us to actually utilize these tests.” In May, Abbott, the manufacturer of the at-home BinaxNOW tests, had such a surplus of tests due to a lack of demand that the company started to lay off employees and throw away test components that had reportedly expired before getting used, according to Newsy. CVS has put a purchasing limit on at-home COVID tests, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 26. Customers are now only allowed to purchase four of a certain test in stores and six of each online. The limits apply to both Abbott Laboratories’ BinaxNOW test and a test from the startup Ellume, which are the only rapid, over-the-counter (OTC) COVID tests CVS sells.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb “COVID-19 home test kits are the top-selling item in our stores,” Tara Burke, a CVS spokesperson, told Northampton, Massachusetts’ Daily Hampshire Gazette. Another spokesperson told Bloomberg that this restriction was made “in order to serve our customers’ OTC testing needs, and due to high demand.” RELATED: For more up-to-date information, sign up for our daily newsletter. Shortages of these COVID tests may only be short-lived, however. A spokesperson for Ellume told Bloomberg that it is scaling up production, while an Abbott spokesperson said in an email to CNN on Aug. 27 that they would be ramping up production in the coming weeks to help offset “supply constraints.” “We’re seeing unprecedented demand as case rates rise—and we’ve been scaling up manufacturing since Delta became the dominant strain and new CDC guidance called for a re-prioritization of testing,” Abbott spokesperson John Koval wrote to CNN. “Today, there are tens of millions of BinaxNOW tests in various settings and supply chains. We’re working with our customers to ensure tests get to where they’re most needed and we’re ramping back up, as we did last year.” “It will take time for the newly vaccinated to get protection from the virus,” the order states. “As we continue to combat COVID-19, testing is a key tool to identify infected individuals and prevent spread to others.” RELATED: This Beloved Lunch Staple Is Disappearing From Grocery Store Shelves.
