Rapid At-Home COVID-19 Tests to Become Available This Week

Here’s the latest development on the COVID-19 pandemic front.

Consumers who would rather bypass the doctor’s office and have a COVID-19 test done from the comfort of their own home will soon be able to do just that, according to USA Today.

Beginning this week, Abbott Laboratories' BinaxNOW coronavirus self-test kits will be shipped to Walgreens, CVS Pharmacy and Walmart locations across the country. The kits will also be available online. The kit, which will cost $23.99, was approved for emergency-use authorization for serial screening last month by the Food and Drug Administration.

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The tests will deliver results in about 15 minutes, unlike tests that are required to be sent to a lab, which typically take 2-3 days to get results.

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security expressed her concern that the tests would be too expensive for low-income consumers:

I still have worries, and the biggest lingering one is the potential cost of these tests. This increases options for some, not all. So we have to keep working to make these tests more widely available.

Abbott is currently producing tens of millions of the tests every month and has the ability to expand production if needed. While the tests will start shipping this week, it will still be a couple of weeks before they become widely available.