During his first State of the Union tackle, President Biden introduced that the identical web site the place Americans might order free at-home covid checks will open up for a second spherical of distribution subsequent week.
The effort to mail out free checks started in mid-January, from an preliminary stockpile of 500,000,000. While the initiative was a welcome change — particularly as an settlement between the White House and several other retail chains to maintain prices of those checks down had simply expired — it was additionally criticized as being insufficient. Its main shortcoming was limiting every recipient tackle to 4 checks, an inadequate quantity for some households.
Presumably this limitation was to stop the nation’s cache of checks from changing into depleted. But based on stories late final week, round half of that preliminary half-billion are but to be claimed.
Unfortunately, this subsequent spherical of distributions will probably be very similar to the primary. While Biden was not particular in his speech to the nation, the covidtests.gov website states that “Starting subsequent week, each dwelling within the U.S. will be capable of order an extra set of 4 checks.”
Covid testing in clinics across the nation stay free, even to these with out insurance coverage protection. The variety of new circumstances continues to fall after the winter Omicron spike, and the CDC not too long ago up to date its steerage to recommend that almost all of Americans now not have to put on masks in most circumstances.