With winter and the holiday travel season on the horizon, the Biden administration has once again begun providing free, at-home COVID-19 diagnostics through the mail. The testing initiative was put on hiatus earlier this year due to a lack of federal funding.
Described by the White House as a “limited round,” starting December 15 every U.S. household is eligible to order a total of four antigen test kits. The potential stocking stuffers will begin shipping through the Postal Service on December 19.
The home testing program was first launched in December 2021, with a plan to offer 500 million kits through COVIDTests.gov. That number soon doubled to 1 billion tests the following January, with supplies collated from a variety of diagnostic manufacturers.
Congressional funding for the effort dried up by early September and was not renewed. Left without it, the Biden administration said this week it moved around its own “limited existing funding to add more at-home COVID-19 tests to the nation’s stockpile.”
At the same time, the White House said it plans to distribute additional tests through food banks and government-assisted housing programs for seniors—alongside nationwide shipments of updated, bivalent vaccine doses and COVID treatments—as the country prepares for a potential surge in infections.
Because while winter for the Northern hemisphere officially starts next week, this year’s flu season has already begun in earnest. According to the CDC, cases of influenza—as well as respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19, making up what has been called a “tripledemic”—have started to climb in recent weeks.
The agency recently estimated that the number of weekly flu-related hospitalizations has now climbed past 25,000. Meanwhile, the U.S. is approaching the milestone of its 100 millionth confirmed COVID case since the start of the pandemic.