White House To Quadruple Number Of At-Home COVID Tests By December

The White House announced on Wednesday that it purchased an additional $1 billion in rapid, at-home COVID tests which will quadruple the number of the product by December.

The announcement by White House COVID coordinator Jeffrey Zients comes after the administration received criticism for providing limited and expensive at-home coronavirus testing. The new commitment to expand supply will help lower cost and make the product more available throughout the U.S. as families head into the holiday season.

"We'll continue to pull every lever as we have throughout the pandemic response on testing to expand manufacturing production of tests in order to make testing even more widely available and drive down the cost per test," Zients said.

Zients added that the administration's investment will give the U.S. 200 million tests per month.

The expansion of COVID testing also comes at a time of worry, as medical officials warn of a potential new surge in the winter months.

“We've just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we're going to do at a particular time. Let’s focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down. And we can do it by people getting vaccinated and also in the situation where boosters are appropriate to get people boosted,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said Monday.

The administration is also expanding the number of pharmacies in the federal government's free testing program to 20,000 in order to increase testing capacity.

Carole Johnson, the White House testing director, said that the adminstratrion's new committment to COVID testing will “help to send a signal to manufacturers to ramp up production, and that’s why we’re confident here that we’ll see increased production.”

She added that the White House is working on the “cost issue” of at-home tests, which value at about $23.99 each. They are also arranging for tests to be distributed through food banks and community health centers.