The announcement is part of a plan to expand access to rapid testing, but most tests won’t be available for at least two weeks.
The Biden administration announced Friday that it will double its supply of coronavirus rapid tests to a total of 1 billion and make those tests freely available online for every American household.to order up to four rapid tests per household .
The move comes as the US struggles with soaring COVID-19 cases caused chiefly by the Omicron variant, which has smashedTests will be free and the only information required for purchase is a name and mailing address. But officials estimated the tests would not ship until 7-12 days of purchase, meaning the soonest they could arrive in homes is Jan. 26.
In early December, the Biden administration unveiled a winter strategy for the Omicron variant, focusing on more people getting boosters, more vaccinations for school-age kids, as well as requirements for private insurers to pay for at-home tests. Later in the month, Biden announced plans to send federal medical teams to assist overloaded hospitals, which are now being deployed, and opening 20,000 free testing sites.
But the requirement for private insurers to cover at-home tests does not go into effect until Jan. 15, meaning it did not help pay for rapid tests during the holiday Omicron surge. The administration also came under fire as at-home test suppliesover the holidays as Omicron cases skyrocketed. This led to the first plans to make 500 million free tests available to Americans, followed by Friday’s doubling of that figure.
Nam Tran, a professor of clinical pathology at the University of California, Davis, said he welcomed Friday’s announcement and noted that any expansion of testing is good news, but he cautioned that people need to remember how to
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