Coronavirus infections have come roaring back this year, prompting the Biden administration to revamp one of its earliest responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: free at-home testing kits delivered by mail.
The Department of Health and Human Services is offering to mail four test kits to any household that wants them. You can sign up for a shipment at covidtests.gov later this month, the department says.
Home tests involve swabbing the inside of your nose to collect a sample, mixing the sample with the included reagent, placing drops of the resulting solution on a test strip, and then waiting 15 to 30 minutes for results.
In 2022 and 2023, the government sent out 900 million free test kits, but the program has been dormant since. Meanwhile, infections saw a surprisingly sharp rise in the summer, driven by a more contagious COVID variant. And public health experts warn that with colder weather forcing more people and events indoors, infection numbers will likely rise again.
If you don't want to wait for tests to arrive in the mail, you can find test kits at many pharmacies. Depending on your insurance coverage, you may be able to get reimbursed for the cost.
For low-income or uninsured families, federal and state governments also offer free testing. Medi-Cal offers up to eight free test kits per month; to find a site that offers free testing for the uninsured, visit testinglocator.cdc.gov.
The kits offered by the federal government contain antigen tests, which look to determine whether a sample taken from the nasal passages contains a protein that binds to the coronavirus’s RNA. They offer results quickly and at low cost (in stores, boxes of two tests cost between $16 and $24), but more expensive molecular tests can detect smaller amounts of the coronavirus in the body.
Antigen tests have been shown to be just as effective as molecular tests at avoiding false positive results. And, according to the CDC, these tests are also just as effective at detecting COVID-19 in people who have symptoms of the disease, such as cough, fever and sore throat.
The CDC warns that the tests are not effective for people who have the virus but are not showing symptoms, especially if they are in the early stages of infection and may not yet have enough viral load to infect others. The agency recommends that people get a second antigen test a few days after the first, so the kits are sold in packs of two.
