U.S. orders 100 million additional COVID-19 tests to hand out.
The United States government has procured more than 100 million COVID-19 tests through testmaker iHealth Lab Inc. as part of the Whitehouse’s plan to give 500 million at-home, free tests across the nation, the Department of Defense said Friday.
Since January January, since January 1, the U.S. government has been permitting households to purchase four COVID-19 tests at home for free on the site COVIDTests.gov and shipping is scheduled within 7 to 12 days of placing an order.
The free tests will help ease the lack of tests throughout the nation due to an increase in demand due to the rapid expansion of the Omicron version.
Reuters published earlier in the month about the White House plans to purchase 500 million more tests over its purchase to boost the number of tests available.
The president has faced criticism for not focusing on testing earlier as a part of his plan to fight the pandemic.
A widespread shortage of testing has hampered the response to pandemics in the last few weeks, owing to the overall expansion of the highly infectious Omicron variant.
Eric is a professional news editor, writer, and blogger for the last 10 years. He is working with NewsGater as an off-beat news editor cum writer.