The Mobile City Council approved a purchase order for 6,000 COVID-19 test kits at its Tuesday meeting on April 21, 2020, agreeing to pay Test Kits at Home LLC $84,350 for the order. Under the terms of the purchase, the city will pay $14 per test kit plus a flat $350 shipping charge. The purchase was one of five COVID-19-related items council members took up for immediate consideration during the meeting.
Councilwoman Bess Rich asked whether the kits were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson said they were not. Rich followed up by asking how the kits would be used in the community, noting that PCR testing remained the standard diagnostic test for the virus. Stimpson clarified that the kits were intended as screening tools rather than diagnostic tests, distinguishing them from PCR tests.
Public Safety Director James Barber told council members there had been some confusion about the difference between antibody tests and PCR tests and how each would be used. He said the city had partnered with Diagnostic Medical and University Hospital to provide trained medical personnel to administer the antibody screenings.
“We have partnered up with Diagnostic Medical and University Hospital to provide those personnel who are administering the antibody screening, so if you do come back with a positive reading that’s when we go to the PCR; so we’re not using it as a diagnostic tool, because it is not approved as an FDA diagnostic tool,” Barber said. “The only approved diagnostic tool is the PCR test and so if you do show antibodies we’ll use the PCR test to see if you are asymptomatic or a carrier of the COVID-19 virus. That’s the only way we can determine it. But I think you’re going to see antibody testing get qualitative and quantitatively better because we have more machinery coming in.”
The purchase reflected a broader push by Mobile officials in the spring of 2020 to expand the city’s COVID-19 testing capacity even as national supply chains and FDA guidance around rapid tests remained in flux, with local leaders weighing the trade-offs between faster screening tools and the slower, but more definitive, PCR diagnostic test.