The government will end its program of free COVID-19 at-home tests Friday because of insufficient congressional funding, a senior Biden administration official said Sunday, NBC News reported.
Both the White House and the website where people can get their tests blamed Congress for failing to provide additional funding for the program, which offered up to 16 free tests per household since the beginning of the year.
"If Congress provides funding, we will expeditiously resume distribution of free tests through CovidTests.gov," the unnamed source said to NBC News. "Until then, we believe reserving the remaining tests for distribution later this year is the best course."
The vast majority of people in the U.S. would still have the option of free testing or getting reimbursed through private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid.
The federal government has distributed an estimated 600 million tests through its COVID-19 test website, NBC reported. It first started shipping the free tests in January, when the omicron variant was peaking.
In March, the White House asked Congress for an additional $22.5 billion in funding for COVID-19 relief efforts, warning that it would be unable to sustain testing capacity without it, NBC reported.
According to CDC statistics, more than 40% of adults in the United States reported having COVID-19 in the past, and nearly 1 in 5 of those (19%) are currently still having symptoms of “long COVID.”
The data were collected from June 1-June 13 by the U.S. Census Bureau and analyzed by CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
Scientific evidence suggests millions of Americans may have been infected with the virus without knowing it because they didn’t have symptoms or had mild cases they mistook for a cold or allergies, WebMD reported.
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