Up to 1 million COVID-19 test kits were left to expire inside a Florida warehouse amid a nationwide shortage triggered by a winter surge of coronavirus cases.
At a news conference held by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Kevin Guthrie, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, confirmed the stockpile of kits, manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, sat unused.
“We had between 800,000 and a million test kits, Abbott rapid test kits, in our warehouse that did expire,” Guthrie told reporters, adding that they were rendered ineffective sometime “before December 26 to December 30.”
Guthrie also defended the kit reserve, claiming that there was not an adequate demand for them — even though people have reported waiting for hours to get tested, particularly in central Florida, starting around mid-December, according to The Orlando Sentinel.
During the same news conference, DeSantis said he planned to ask President Joe Biden to extend their expiration deadline before revealing plans to send 1 million at-home COVID-19 tests to nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and other residences with high numbers of seniors in the state.
“Having a stockpile was the right thing to do,” If we had done the opposite, we would have run out,” DeSantis said. “No one really wanted them for many, many months.”
In recent weeks, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have spiked in Florida, thanks in part to the quick-spreading omicron variant. The state is averaging 37,563 new cases a day over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University.
