COVID-19 at-home test kits will be available for free
The federal government will ship COVID-19 home tests for free via COVIDTests.gov starting in late September.
The federal government will again offer households free COVID-19 tests kits to U.S. households at the end of September.
This is the seventh time in the past three years that the government has provided free test kits, USA TODAY reports. About 900 million home tests have been sent to homes.
People are also reading: COVID-19 is on the rise in Texas. Here’s a map that shows where cases are highest
The latest rollout of COVID-19 tests are designed to detect the current dominant variants and can be used until the end of the year, according to health officials.
This round of free COVID-19 tests intends to predate the surge of COVID-19 cases that usually occurs in the winter. Cases of the respiratory virus tend to spike twice a year, in the winter and then again in the summer, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Since the pandemic, COVID-19 has joined the flu and the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) as a common respiratory virus that peaks in the colder months of the year.
How to get free COVID tests
Beginning at the end of September, each U.S. household will be able to order up to four COVID-19 tests at COVIDTests.gov. Once ordered, the at-home tests will be mailed for free. An exact date for when Americans can order tests has not yet been released.
The tests will be able to detect the dominant variants that are circulating, including the following subvariants, according to the CDC.:
KP.3.1.1: 37% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.KP.3: Made up over 16% of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S.COVID-19 cases surge in Texas
Last month, the CDC reported five southern and southwestern states, including Texas, had the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the U.S. These rates had slowed slightly by the first week of September: 15.2% of those tested for COVID-19 in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas tested positive.
The national average rate for positive COVID-19 tests in the same time period was 14.9%, a 1.6% drop from the previous week.
Click here to see the latest COVID-19 information from Texas.
Track latest COVID-19 data on XEC, other variants
According to the CDC’s latest Nowcast data reflecting the two-week period starting on Sept. 1 and ending on Sept. 14., these are the most common COVID variants:
Can’t see the table? Click here to view it.
COVID-19 variant KP.3.1.1 accounts for more than half of positive infections in the United States, the latest projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show.
The agency’s Nowcast data tracker, which displays COVID-19 estimates and projections for two-week periods, reflected that the KP.3.1.1 variant accounted for 52.7% of positive infections, followed by KP.2.3 at 12.2% in the two-week stretch starting on Sept. 1 and ending on Sept. 14.
KP.3.1.1 first became the leading variant in the two-week period, starting on July 21st and ending on August 3rd.
“The KP.3.1.1 variant is very similar to other circulating variants in the United States. All current lineages are descendants of JN.1, which emerged in late 2023,” Rosa Norman, a spokesperson at the CDC, previously told USA TODAY.
Previously, the KP.3.1.1 variant made up 40.0% of cases for the two-week period that started on Aug. 18 and ended on Aug. 31, and KP.2.3 accounted for 14.5%. According to the data, KP.3.1.1 rose 12.7%, and KP.2.3 decreased 2.3% from Aug. 31 in projected positive infections.
New COVID XEC variant rapidly spreading across US
Although not reflected on the CDC’s Nowcast data tracker, a newly discovered COVID strain known as XEC continues to spread rapidly across multiple countries, including the U.S.
Scripps Research’s Outbreak.info page, last updated on Sept. 5, reported 95 XEC cases across 12 U.S. states and 15 different countries.
— USA TODAY contributed to this report.
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Publish date : 2024-09-20 05:04:00
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