No plans to expand COVID testing in Tennessee, despite Omicron’s rapid spread

Tennessee’s public health departments are experiencing long waits to get COVID tests as the Omicron variant rapidly spreads across the state.

The new variant now represents an estimated 80% of all positive tests in the state. But there are no plans to expand testing capacity during the holidays.

Dr. Lisa Piercey, the state’s health commissioner, says at-home testing is more accessible than it has ever been, and so, she says, residents should be less reliant on public testing sites.

“This is not the last surge we’re going to have,” she says. “I understand that weening people off of this, ‘You must go to the state, and you must have it done here every single time.’ I know that’s a little bit uncomfortable because that’s what we focused on for the last two years. But we’re starting to incorporate this just into typical operations.”

In Nashville, where public testing has remained more accessible than in most of the state, the city still plans to close drive-thru sites on Friday and Monday for the Christmas holiday. Residents waited in long lines at the two sites Wednesday, which also didn’t open until 10 a.m. due to cold temperatures in the morning.

Statewide, positive tests are spiking with an average of 2,200 cases a day over the last week. But Piercey says the new cases are likely a severe undercount since health officials rarely get notification of at-home tests. She says the daily tally is no longer reliable for more than identifying weekly trends, which is one reason the Tennessee Department of Health will stop publishing figures every day.

Hospitalizations remain the most reliable indicator of severity. And Tennessee’s numbers have nearly doubled in the last few weeks, at roughly 1,100 patients, but aren’t yet growing as quickly as during the Delta surge.