At-Home Test FAQs
You can find a free testing site near you on the CDC's No-Cost COVID Testing locator. Tests available at these sites may be rapid tests or PCR tests.
You may be able to get free tests through your local health department.
Whenever you test yourself with a rapid test, remember to report your result — whether it's positive or negative.
The MakeMyTestCount team deals only with reporting test results and providing education regarding at-home testing.
For questions and concerns regarding test kits from the federal government, please use the Contact Us form for the COVID.gov website.
If it's been kept dry and at room temperature, it'll probably still work, especially if it expired only recently. In fact, it may not be expired at all. The expiration dates of most at-home COVID-only tests have been extended by the FDA.
To find out whether your COVID test's expiration date has been changed:
If you live in California, your state department of public health has decided that you can use your test no matter what the date on the box says, as long as the control line on the test appears when it’s supposed to.
If you don't live in California:
1. Go to the FDA's website and look for the brand of test you have. If you see "Extended Expiration Date" in the Expiration Date column (for example, as shown here in the red circle), then the FDA has changed the expiration dates for that brand.
2. Then, go to the Expiration Date column for your brand of test on the FDA site and click on the link there. That will bring up a page with the old expiration dates (blue arrow) and the new expiration dates (yellow arrow).
3. Next, look for the expiration date on your test's packaging and find that date on the FDA page. The date in the right-hand column is the new expiration date for your test.
If you're at high risk of getting very sick from COVID or flu, we strongly recommend that you contact your health care provider right away to get treatment. High-risk people who get treated are much less likely to get severely sick or need to go to the hospital. Here's how to know if you're high risk.
If you don't have a health care provider, there are ways you can get treatment. If you're eligible, you may be able to get medication at low cost or even for free:
Go to a local pharmacy that's part of the Test to Treat programs. A clinician there can prescribe COVID medication for you.
Contact your local community health center. They may have clinicians who can prescribe COVID or flu medication for you.
Contact your local public health department. They may be able to give you more options in your area.
Here are the latest recommendations about preventing the spread of COVID and flu.
Whenever you test yourself with a rapid test, remember to report your result — whether it's positive or negative.
You don't need to quarantine.
If you are in one of these groups, you are at high risk of getting very sick from COVID and / or flu. Here are the CDC's recommendations for:
If you get symptoms, follow the CDC's recommendations about preventing the spread of COVID and flu.
The most common reason is this:
Most at-home tests are antigen tests, which look for proteins from the virus. They're very good at turning positive if you have a lot of active virus in your nose.
But these days, people tend to get symptoms before their virus levels get high enough for an antigen test to detect. If you test too soon after you've gotten infected, an antigen test will show up negative. That's why the FDA recommends that if you have symptoms and test negative, wait 48 hours and test again.
The tests that health care providers use are often molecular tests (either PCR or LAMP tests). Those can detect a much smaller amount of virus than an antigen test can. That means they can diagnose an infection much earlier.
However, the trick with those tests is that they'll show up positive even when you're no longer contagious. That's why you're not supposed to take a molecular test for 90 days after you've had COVID.
A few at-home tests for COVID and flu are available in the US. You can find them online and in some pharmacies. More at-home tests that can detect both COVID and flu should be available by the end of the year.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decides which drugs and medical tests can be used in the United States. The full FDA approval process can take months to years.
When a public-health emergency happens, there isn’t time for new drugs or tests to go through the entire process. That’s when the FDA can use Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). It allows the FDA to let certain medical products be used more quickly, while still making sure they are as safe as possible. At a minimum, the product must have known and potential benefits that outweigh its known potential risks. In addition, there must be “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives” to the product receiving the EUA.
Most at-home tests for COVID have EUA, including those that come with flu tests.
Here is a list of all the COVID-only tests that have been fully approved by the FDA. Search for "home test" to find ones you can buy.
All flu-only tests that are available in the US have been fully approved.
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