COVIDtests.gov – Free at-home Covid-19 tests
covidtests.gov
covidtests.gov
Finding out that my Governor let a million tests expire rather than give them out, make me happy this site is available. I'm glad I can rely on the federal government to fix what my state government is ruining.
> Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last week that the tests weren't distributed because of "low demand." [1]
> Florida residents have also described months of difficulty getting tests, with long lines and few testing appointment available. [1]
I haven't filed the relevant FOIA requests myself, but Florida open government and transparency laws are fairly robust for those who are inquiring in this specific matter.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-tests-expired-florida-fda...
[2] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/coronavirus/2022/01...
It's more complicated than a headline, but it's a really bad look to raid someone who was trying to get info out - even if their goal was political it should have been public information and that just intimidates future whistleblowers.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/editorials/fl-op-edit-r...
https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2021-07-29...
More tests aren't going to solve anything. At best they might slow the spread down only slightly. In the long run everyone will be exposed regardless of whether they go to their favorite hangouts or not. That is our reality.
Also we all have friends and family members with high-risk conditions and don't want to give it to them either.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072548446/public-health-expe...
The virus isn't going away. No one will be able to avoid it without living as a hermit. The CDC estimated that about 44% of Americans had already been infected as of October 2021 and with the more contagious Omicron variant now circulating we're probably well over 50%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Additional home testing is largely a feel-good measure. It might ease some people's anxiety but won't significantly change the course of the pandemic.
This can be said of every cold and flu season. Yet people still go out of their way to avoid those who are sick, and people who have symptoms stay home. You probably wouldn't want someone with the flu to cough in your face, even though the symptoms are mild and the mortality is low.
covid is much more infectious than the flu. it makes sense to test and quarantine if you are positive.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Very interested if you have a source for this claim, as I have been looking for one.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
44% reduction after 6 months is not great but that's still significantly better than under 20% for preventing symptomatic cases which you have for a 2 dose vaccinated person facing Omicron half a year later.
However I am not sure if we had started this pandemic with Omicron and a 44% effective vaccine, that we would have put all our eggs in one basket the way we have to date. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
You aren't crazy. Here's some actual data from the CDC: a child is at least 25 times less likely to be covid hospitalized than an adult under age 50, and 74 times less likely than an someone over age 50. Important caveat that this data is pre-omicron. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e3.htm
>most people have family or friends who are vulnerable and need to be protected
Couldn't agree more.
in the interest of precision: the risk of serious sickness/death is low for anyone without comorbidities (like age) regardless of vaccination status; vaccination just makes a small chance smaller, with the diminishing returns that that implies.
vaccination really matters for anyone with comorbidities (age, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, etc.), where risk reduction is significant (whole percentages to fractional ones).
totally agree that testing doesn't change long-run exposure, especially given omicron. the big win for testing though, is knowing how many folks have natural immunity (with or without synthetic immunity), which likely offers broader spectrum immunological memory, imbuing a more durable herd immunity into the future. also, tests might help at the margin for those who have comorbidities, to perhaps allow the pursuit of treatments like monoclonal antibodies earlier.
Doctors don't prescribe monoclonal antibodies or other anti-viral drugs based on a home test. That usually requires a clinical test, as well as some significant symptoms or risk factors.
not sure why the tests being antigen-based matters with regard to indicating natural/cellular immunity, since a positive test result still implies a covid infection in the recent past, which implies a conferral of natural immunity?
You seem to be describing what journalist Alex Berenson has coined the "happy vaccine valley":
>the three-to four-month period following the second dose when antibodies are high enough that the vaccines actually appear to work. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two weeks of negative efficacy after the first shot, a month of maybe 50% efficacy, three months of near-complete protection, and then a rapid fall to what looks like 0% protection within three months. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/so-you-understand-whats-...
Of course that description was written in Sept 2021 based on pre-Omicron data, and the picture is different now. The latest data: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.22268919v...
See Figures 1 and 2 above. This study from California in December shows much lower protection from the current vaccines against Omicron compared to Delta: 0% effectiveness of a 2-dose regimen at 6+ months, and 49% effectiveness of a 3-dose regimen at ~2+ months.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072548446/public-health-expe...
As for "what actually matters," that entirely depends on the problem you are trying to solve, the solutions you are putting on the table, and the human value systems at play.
Omicron has been strikingly mild, regardless of vaccination status. A new study of over 52,000 infected found "zero cases with Omicron variant infection received mechanical ventilation." https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
The Kaiser-Permanente study you linked is by actual medical experts and it paints a more nuanced perspective which is why it contradicts his claims — for example, they have the two dose effectiveness at preventing infection by Delta over 50% even a year out.
Most importantly, and the main reason I'm replying to this, is that it's _really_ important to also remember that there are two reasons to get vaccinated. One is to prevent infection entirely (largely a product of neutralizing antibodies, which fade relatively quickly) but the other is to lower the severity of an infection (a product of T cells, which is longer lasting) and the data continues to show that vaccines remain highly effective considerably longer than 3 months:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/01/studies-...
Promoting the voices of antivaxers like Alex Berenson is the single most effective way to prolong the pandemic since the thing which will allow us to return to normal will be high levels of vaccination reducing the severity of an infection to manageable levels.
Thanks for at least looking at the data and not dismissing it out of hand.
The article you link above to support vaccine effectiveness refers to three studies, all of which are pre-Omicron (the first looks at Jul '21 to Oct '21, the second specifically at Alpha and Delta variants, and the third from Dec '20 to Sep '21). A key point of my comment was do show that, with the advent of Omicron, the playing field has changed substantially, which your data do not address - but my data did.
I didn't and wasn't telling people not to get vaccinated. I believe, though, that there is a world where we can simultaneously talk about how the vaccine doesn't work as well as it should or could, and look to better solutions, including a new or improved vaccine.
Not really, he was a business reporter with no medical training — he came to the NYT from The Street, and after he left to become a novelist his only subsequent non-fiction (kind of) work was a book alleging that cannabis usage causes psychosis, which got him considerable criticism from actual scientists.
> However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative
It's not censorship to suggest being less credulous and finding people who know what they're talking about to get advice from. It's not hard to find scientists who disagree with each other — it's a defining characteristic! — but he's not a scientist or even amplifying a significant group of scientists, and the ones who mention him do so to say that he's dangerously wrong. The most obvious giveaway is that he started with a paranoid conclusion rather than a falsifiable theory and when whatever he's saying is debunked he switches to something else which conveniently still supports the same conclusion. Even Fox News backed away from giving him a pulpit!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
I see they have this behind Akamai. That's a good thing because my first thought was "Man, I hope they have this site behind a good load balancer!"
In the UK we’ve been able to order a box of 7 lateral flow tests, for free (no shipping costs either), once per day, since last April. In other words 49 tests per week (per household). They’re not a perfect solution (since you can test negative when in the very early stages of an infection I believe) but they’re pretty good. They’ve made all of my group interactions so much safer, particularly during this latest wave, and have saved me from hanging out with people who are positive (and asymptomatic at the time) on numerous occasions.
The British government is a joke and they’ve still managed to get basics like rapid testing and vaccinations right. How can a country with resources like the US not have this available?
But agree it should have been done nationwide. Same with masks. Trump canceled the idea of USPS mailing free masks and at least one supplier publicly complained he couldn't get a federal commitment for long term production.
When I visited France last summer during low point tests where available everywhere and super cheap.
> Rapid antigen tests can cost as little as $2 each to make, according to Mologic, one of the largest British testmakers. But in the United States, bidding wars between health systems, state governments, and employers have contributed to much higher prices. ... In Germany, large government purchases allow it to offer rapid tests to residents for less than $1 each
Here in Denmark, they're about 25kr ($4) each in shops, or a little less if ordered online. However, most people go to the public test centres, which are free. (We've reached an average of 19 tests per person, which I think doesn't include home tests.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
I bought some at Lidl and Aldi for less then 1€ a few months ago. You can buy them almost everywhere, the current price is ~2-3€ now. I don’t really see what the government has to do with this, they don’t sell tests as far as I understand.
Or even Walmart. Most of my BinaxNow tests shipped via Walmart within a week.
* Yes, "at cost" != free - but the idea was to leverage the retailers' distribution capabilities.
As you've observed, it's been too late three weeks ago, where I ordered one from a private provider. They took the money, but, uh, have not fulfilled the order.
Who could have possibly foreseen that in year three of an ongoing pandemic, there might be a demand for... COVID Tests?
You will need these for the next wave, and no, getting COVID doesn't prevent getting it again in the future - reinfections of already infected are rife with Omicron.
As such, in this alternate world without the intervention, a chunk of the populace cannot afford to test. If one wanted to make slightly rasher assumptions, this segment might include those who are in jobs (Walmart, food preparation and service) that expose them to a large part of the population.
As of today, if I want a test, my options are
* private seller - hard to source with high demand and expensive for those with limited income
* public test center - availability is a nightmare right now
* medical provider, be it PCP or ER
I don’t personally know how many people are choosing option 3, but anecdotally I have heard from friends and colleagues that they’ve chosen it for when their kids/they are sick.
There’s also an interesting side effect here: every at-home positive is a positive public health authorities won’t know about.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
https://www.wsj.com/articles/unable-to-get-covid-19-tests-am...
All this mass testing is a colossal waste of health resources that doesn’t add any useful information beyond bumping up the case count.
Covid is endemic. Part of learning to live with it is to not test everybody that comes down with flu/cold-like symptoms. We’ve never done this for other respiratory viruses except before prescribing very specific medications like tamiflu.
Yes, for those with private insurance it's good that in principle one can be reimbursed for buying home test kits (starting tomorrow) but good luck finding them! When I traveled recently I checked 3 pharmacies, and got responses ranging from "try again next week" to "we've been out of stock for 2 months".
But this site is hosted by Akamai so maybe this time it's different?
There's a lot of potential good in sending them to people who will never request them.
A large % of the red state population doesn’t want a test.
My friend's parents (Stockton, CA) aren't getting tested for this reason. They didn't get tested the first time they came down with 'Valley Fever', back in 2020, either.
(They also quit their jobs because of vaccination requirements, and believe that Trump won in 2020, and that he will reclaim the presidency on <a number of dates that have long passed>. It doesn't make me a bigot to point this sort of thing out, or that these beliefs tend to cluster.)
People generally hold sweeping, often negative, opinions of "those people". Over the decades, "those people" has been defined by race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Today in the US it is which political party people perceive you to be affiliated with.
I call this a feedback cycle because in my experience the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. Undoing that is hard work so it just doesn't happen. Absent any pressure, people assume themselves correct and chalk up another datapoint confirming their own biases.
This is readily apparent in response to any mass killing/tragedy. My more politically extreme friends seem to race for any evidence they can find that they perpetrator is Democrat/Republican. Of course this boils down to pure speculation (gun ownership, smokes pot, etc), but the urgency and desire is there all the same.
In summary it is little surprise that the politicians in Washington are so hardlined on their stances and party affiliations. This is effectively the government the voters have demanded. When the citizens of a country start vilify half the country, their representatives reaching across the isle is political suicide. And thus we sit.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this point. Any data you can share that red/blue is not the most efficient segmentation for pro/anti-vaxx and/or pro/anti-test?
I tried making a trend line comparing Vax % by state to Biden vote %. Interesting result[1] that i think supports both of our arguments. A trend line exists to support your claim, though i would argue it's not a great fit and the data is quite scattered.
I should also say i didn't mean to harsh address your comment specifically. I don't dispute the trend you claimed i was more ranting about the larger categorization that my parent comment was asking about.
Linking my sources[2][3] as well.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
2: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
4: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
Some people feel that the mass asymptomatic testing serves to give perpetual fodder for sensationalist media headlines, as well as justification for public officials to impose new rounds of lockdowns, etc. As such those people believe that participating in asymptomatic testing only worsens those problems by creating "cases" in the absence of any actual clinical problem (that is to say, declaring people who are asymptomatic as COVID-19 positive even though COVID is an acronym that includes the word "disease"). They may also be against the general idea of constantly testing for the presence of a specific respiratory virus, however unique SARS-CoV-2 may be.
Better to ship the tests to the people that actually want them.
--
As an aside, you're right about "a large % of the red state population(s)", but I'd add that most "blue" people seem to think republicans are much more anti-vax / anti-test than they are. A majority of republicans are vaccinated, and a majority appear to support masking (at least indoors), or at the least are willing to begrudgingly comply. Here in California I feel like I meet a lot of people that seem to think that republicans are overwhelmingly "anti-vax" or, even more humorously, that Trump is anti-vax (humorous because his vocal praise of "boosters" and incessant bragging that he deserves credit for the vaccines and that the vaccines+lockdowns saved tens/hundreds of millions of lives, is one of his most unpopular stances with his base)
People who are worried about omicron and can afford $15 per test already have a supply.
People who aren’t worried about omicron will throw them away.