US failure on free at-home COVID tests
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The quick spread of the Omicron variant in the US has given value to the rapid at-home COVID tests, but how much value?
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President Biden will buy 500 million quick tests this winter and give them for free to Americans.
Omicron moves quickly, and rapid testing that can instantaneously confirm infectiousness - rather than PCR lab studies that typically take days to get the results - can assist in containing the spread.
However, new measures in the United States to give more free tests are likely to be too little, too late to make a significant dent in this wave.
US President Joe Biden announced yesterday that his administration will buy 500 million quick tests this winter and give them to Americans, with the first shipment arriving in January.
The White House will also set up additional testing facilities to attempt and assist in the production of more diagnostics.
Nonetheless, the United States is still hampered by months of ignoring the necessity of speedy testing and the FDA's slow approval of more of them.
"Rapid tests are one of the most powerful tools that have not really been utilized in a powerful way in this pandemic," Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist who is now the chief science officer of the home testing company eMed, said in a press event yesterday.
For Americans who are not always finding at-home tests, or who cannot pay $25 every time they need to be tested, this might sound like great news yet experts believe the amount of free tests offered by the Biden Administration is not even close to what is needed to decrease the spread of the Omicron variant in the US.
