White House shipping COVID-19 tests via USPS mail to Americans: report
The Washington Post says a website will soon be established from where Americans can request test kits, and they will be mailed.
A reported 500 million coronavirus test kits will soon arrive at American households via the United States Postal Service under the direction of The White House.
The mailout is part of the Biden administration’s response to the rising coronavirus case numbers as the omicron variant continues to rip across the nation, according to The Washington Post.
The Post reports that a website will soon be established from where Americans can request test kits and they will be mailed, starting in mid-January.
While The White House did not comment on the report, confidential sources say that the first purchase agreement from manufacturers of coronavirus test kits has been signed. A formal announcement about the effort is expected next week.
On Dec. 21, President Joe Biden announced his administration’s stepped-up testing efforts, telling Americans he understood “how tired, worried and frustrated you are” amid a surge in diagnoses that dampened Christmas celebrations.
Biden said that while the omicron variant is spreading rapidly, the new case count differs from the earliest days of the pandemic because more than 200 million Americans are vaccinated against the virus.
“The bottom line is it’s a lot better than it was,” said the president, “but we are taking even more steps to make it easier to get tests and get tested for free.”
As previously reported, COVID-19’s highly-transmissible omicron variant appears to be causing breakthrough cases and causes mild symptoms in people who have been vaccinated and who’ve received a booster shot.
The high-transmission rate of the omicron variant of COVID-19 could potentially mean that as it rips its way through the U.S. population, leaving antibodies in its wake, herd immunity may actually be possible. Omicron is responsible for as many as 73% of COVID cases in the country.
Just before Christmas, as case numbers were exploding, Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an appearance on Good Morning America that omicron is “truly unprecedented in the rapidity at which it spreads.”
Experts have said that it is unlikely that COVID will ever completely go away. “This virus is so well adapted for human-to-human transmission that it’s never going to away,” virologist Dr. Timothy Brewer says. “There will be periods when there will be more cases and [fewer] cases, just like it occurs with influenza every year.”
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