- Chicago Department of Public Health revising at-home COVID 19 vaccine schedule; flu shot also offered WLS-TV
- Early Updated COVID-19 Vaccine Recipients Left Wondering: When’s the Next Booster Shot? | The Report | U.S. News U.S. News & World Report
- Preliminary Estimates of Effectiveness of Monovalent mRNA Vaccines in Preventing Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Children Aged 3–5 Years — Increasing Community Access to Testing Program, United States, July 2022–February 2023 | MMWR CDC
- Few Americans Have Had Updated COVID Booster ; HCPs Can Help Medscape
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: athome
US government to end free at-home Covid test program this week
Both the White House and the website where people can claim their tests blamed Congress for failing to provide additional funding for the program, which provided up to 16 free tests per household since the beginning of the year.
“Ordering through this program will be suspended on Friday, September 2 because Congress hasn’t provided additional funding to replenish the nation’s stockpile of tests,” the Covid.gov website reads.
The administration launched the initiative, which shipped rapid tests to Americans via the United States Postal Service, in January amidst a wave in Omicron variant cases and limited testing availability. However, officials have warned for months that, absent additional funding from Congress, the administration would be forced to roll back its Covid-19 response efforts.
“We have warned that Congressional inaction would force unacceptable tradeoffs and harm our overall COVID-19 preparedness and response—and that the consequences would likely worsen over time,” the White House official told CNN. “Unfortunately, because of the limited funding we have to work with, we have had to make impossible choices about which tools and programs to invest in—and which ones we must downsize, pause, or end all together.”
Still, the official said the administration would “expeditiously resume distribution of free tests through COVIDTests.gov” if and when Congress allocates additional funding, but “[u]ntil then, we believe reserving the remaining tests for distribution later this year is the best course.”
People Exposed to Coronavirus May Need to Take as Many as Three At-Home Tests, F.D.A. Says
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a new recommendation on Thursday that asymptomatic people who are using coronavirus antigen tests take at least three tests, each spaced 48 hours apart, to reduce the odds of missing an infection.
People who have Covid-19 symptoms should take at least two tests, 48 hours apart, according to the agency.
The new guidelines come as the highly transmissible BA.5 subvariant of Omicron continues to spread, and after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased its recommendation for routine surveillance testing in most circumstances.
Many people have reported that at-home tests failed to detect their infections, but studies have generally shown that rapid antigen tests are as good at detecting Omicron as they were at detecting Delta, the previous variant of concern.
The new recommendations are “very grounded in science,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist who is now the chief science officer for eMed, which sells at-home tests. “Sometimes it takes the virus two days to grow to a detectable level and sometimes it takes six days to grow.”
Read More on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Experts have long noted that rapid antigen tests, which are less sensitive than P.C.R. tests, are designed to be used serially, and that they are most likely to detect the coronavirus when people take them repeatedly over the course of several days.
The new recommendations emphasize the need for “additional testing over a longer period of time,” the agency said.
“The F.D.A.’s new recommendations for at-home Covid-19 antigen tests underscore the importance of repeat testing after a negative test result in order to increase the chances of detecting an infection,” Dr. Jeff Shuren, the director of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement.
The new guidance is based on the results of a new national study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal. The study, led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, focused on 154 people who tested positive for the virus using P.C.R. tests between October 2021 and February of this year.
It found that among symptomatic people, two tests taken 48 hours apart detected 93 percent of infections. But the same testing pattern detected just 63 percent of infections in asymptomatic people.
When people without symptoms took three tests, each two days apart, the tests caught 79 percent of infections.
“We provide data-based evidence on how to test when using rapid antigen tests,” said Dr. Apurv Soni, an assistant professor at UMass Chan Medical School, who led the research. “The schedule of testing is important.”
Some people enrolled in the study had Delta infections, while others were infected with Omicron, the researchers said.
“The fact that the tests can detect Omicron is an important point that cannot be emphasized enough,” said Nathaniel Hafer, a molecular biologist at UMass Chan Medical School and an author of the study.
People who are worried that they may be infected even after receiving two or three negative results on at-home antigen tests can continue to test themselves, seek out a more sensitive P.C.R. test or consult with a doctor, the F.D.A. said.
Those who test positive using at-home tests, the agency said, should assume that they are infected and follow the guidelines set forth by the C.D.C.
The C.D.C. updated its Covid-19 guidance on Thursday but did not change its recommendation that people who test positive for the coronavirus isolate at home for at least five days.
People do not need to use the same brand of test each time, the F.D.A. said.
“If you plan to use at-home COVID-19 antigen tests, have several tests on hand so you can test more than once,” the agency said.
What to Do If You Have COVID Symptoms but Your At-Home Test Is Negative
There was a time when testing positive for COVID came with the confidence that you wouldn’t get reinfected for a few months. Unfortunately, we no longer have that sense of short-term protection. In addition to keeping yourself safe with a well-fitted mask, it’s smart to redeem your free COVID tests by mail and test regularly.
The good news: At-home COVID tests have never been more readily available. The bad: As you’ve probably heard (if not experienced firsthand), at-home antigen tests aren’t perfectly reliable.
The COVID strains currently circulating, BA.4 and BA.5, are particularly good at evading detection by at-home antigen tests, according to experts. Here’s what to do if your at-home test results are negative but you’re still experiencing COVID symptoms.
Why your COVID test could be negative
A negative test result cannot totally rule out infection. If you’re experiencing COVID symptoms (or you were exposed to COVID), but you’re taking comfort in a negative test, a few things could be going on.
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The BA.4 and BA.5 might take longer to show up on at-home tests. Even if it’s not one of these highly transmissible strains, you may have tested too early regardless (you should wait at least five days after exposure to test). Similarly, your viral load might not be high enough to give a positive result, even though you are infected with the virus.
Then there’s good ol’ user error. Even before the current variants, at-home antigen tests were never a perfect system. This isn’t to suggest that you should eschew them altogether; experts told CNBC that people should still use at-home antigen tests if they’re experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to the virus.
CDC guidelines say that no matter your situation, you should test again one to two days after your negative test. Make sure you’re storing your at-home tests correctly and consider getting a PCR test done if you can.
If you’re experiencing symptoms, you should isolate
If you have COVID-like symptoms, you should assume you are contagious, even if it ends up being something other than COVID. It’s a good idea to stay home and keep others safe. Remember: Your “mild” symptoms could manifest far more severely in someone else.
The bottom line is if you feel sick, you’re probably sick with something. A negative test result doesn’t magically make your physical symptoms imaginary. Isolate and mask indoors. Even if it’s not COVID, no one wants whatever you have.
BA.5 Symptoms, At-Home Testing and Everything Else We Know About the New COVID Variant
For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites.
What’s happening
The omicron variant of COVID-19 keeps changing, creating newer, more contagious variants. BA.5 seems to be the most contagious version to date and is causing most current COVID-19 cases in the US
Why it matters
BA.5 is causing more reinfection in people who already had COVID-19, including earlier versions of omicron. It’s also evading immunity from the vaccines.
What it means for you
BA.5 doesn’t appear to be causing more severe disease than earlier variants, and the vaccines are still effective at preventing severe disease and death. To stay protected, get the booster shots you’re eligible for and wear a mask in public.
BA.5, the newest version of COVID-19’s omicron variant, constitutes about 78% of current COVID-19 cases, according to an estimate by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because of BA.5’s makeup, people who already had COVID-19 are most likely not as protected as they would’ve been if facing an earlier strain, federal health officials said last week at a White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing.
This could explain another rise in COVID-19 cases, and more importantly a rise in hospitalizations. While the current seven-day average of new hospitalizations is rising slightly week over week, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, the rate has doubled compared with early May.
At the meeting, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, explained how the virus that causes COVID-19 keeps mutating, and the virus “essentially bumped one variant off the table after the other,” which has led to a long parade of increasingly contagious subvariants of omicron. The mutation that’s now responsible for the majority of COVID-19 cases is BA.5, an extremely contagious version of omicron.
Though the newest subvariant “substantially” evades antibodies from prior infections and vaccines, Fauci said, being up-to-date with a booster (or two boosters, if you’re 50 or older) is still protective against severe disease and death. That’s because research shows that BA.5 doesn’t lessen the protection against severe disease compared with earlier versions of omicron. And while not much is known about its clinical severity compared with earlier subvariants of omicron, it doesn’t appear to be causing more severe disease, Response Team officials said.
In an effort to target the most relevant strain of virus causing COVID-19, vaccines based on the BA.5 subvariant (along with BA.4) will be the first choice for COVID-19 booster shots this fall. Response Team Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha encouraged everyone to get a booster if they’re eligible and haven’t opted for one yet, because it won’t affect their ability to get vaccinated come fall or winter when new boosters start rolling out to Americans. What’s more, COVID-19 treatments, including Paxlovid, are predicted to be effective still, and the US Test to Treat clinics are still up and running to connect people most at risk with prescriptions for treatments if they need them.
Here’s what we know about BA.5.
Do the at-home tests detect BA.5?
Right now there’s no reason to suggest that the at-home rapid COVID-19 tests (a few boxes of which are free when you order through the government’s website) are less effective against BA.5 compared with earlier versions of omicron. Generally speaking, the FDA says early data suggests the antigen tests detect omicron but may have reduced sensitivity.
Typically, rapid home tests work by detecting the part of the COVID-19 virus protein that doesn’t change much between variants, called the nucleocapsid, Slate reports. “Because of that, the tests are able to detect the different variants,” Nate Hafer, an assistant professor of molecular medicine at UMass Chan Medical School, told the publication.
If you have symptoms of COVID-19 but test negative with an at-home COVID-19 test, consider having a PCR test done, which is a highly sensitive and accurate lab-based COVID-19 test.
How severe is BA.5? Do COVID-19 treatments still work?
BA.5 is a subvariant of omicron, which means it’s different from the “original” omicron, but not different enough to constitute its own variant status. (Delta is a different variant from omicron and beta, for example.) BA.5 is understood to be the most contagious version of the virus yet, however, and it’s evading immunity. This means more people will get reinfected with COVID-19, which can put them at risk of complications and long COVID symptoms, even if the infection itself was mild.
Walensky said Tuesday that we don’t definitively know yet about the clinical severity of BA.5 compared to earlier subvariants of omicron. But that said, BA.5 doesn’t appear to be associated with more severe disease compared to recent strains of the virus, Fauci said.
In an analysis of a preliminary (not yet peer-reviewed) report from the Kirby Institute in Australia, Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scrips Research, wrote that BA.5’s ability to infect cells might be more similar to the delta variant than other versions of omicron. He also writes that changes in BA.5 might explain reports of people taking longer to test negative compared to illnesses with earlier omicron subvariants.
As with other versions of omicron that whittled down our immunity, the vaccines and boosters available are still expected to provide protection against severe disease and death. Boosters — including a second booster — have been particularly important for protecting older adults and other people more vulnerable to severe disease in the age of omicron, and have substantially cut the risk of death from COVID-19.
Paxlovid, an effective antiviral medication, is still expected to be effective at treating COVID-19 in people at higher risk of severe disease, Fauci said Tuesday. The monoclonal antibody therapy available, bebtelovimab from Eli Lilly, is also predicted to be effective against BA.5, as is Evusheld.
If you test positive for COVID-19 and are at higher risk of severe disease (you’re an older adult or you have a health condition), reach out to your doctor or find a Test to Treat clinic near you.
What are the symptoms?
Right now, there aren’t any reports that show BA.5 is giving people different symptoms compared to earlier versions of omicron.
For many people who become sick with COVID-19 these days (particularly those who are fully vaccinated and boosted), symptoms resemble cold symptoms such as sore throat, runny nose and fatigue. Back pain is a peculiar new symptom of COVID-19 that some people with omicron have reported, and the once very common loss of taste or smell appears to be much less common with omicron variants than with older strains.
If you have symptoms and are wondering whether it’s COVID-19, taking a test and staying home while you’re sick will help protect people more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 disease.
Read more: Is It Allergies or COVID? How to Tell the Difference
Sarah Tew/CNET
Understanding omicron, variants and subvariants
Variants are made up of multiple lineages and sublineages. Each variant has a “parent” lineage, according to the CDC, followed by other lineages, which you can think of like a family tree. As the virus spreads between people, mutations occur, but not all of them change the characteristics of the virus in meaningful ways.
The omicron variant and its sublineages made the virus much more contagious and capable of infecting more people, but it’s led to less severe disease, on average, than the delta variant.
One of the most important things we can do to stop the virus from mutating is keeping community levels of COVID-19 low so the virus has less chance to mutate, Fauci said.
Genomic surveillance can detect variants and sublineages. Scientists in South Africa were able to quickly identify omicron as a new variant because of the way it presents through PCR tests. The original omicron causes a dropped signal or marker on the test that sets it apart from delta, which was the dominant variant prior to omicron. BA.2, however, didn’t have the same signal, called an S gene target failure. This made it more “stealthy” and gave it its name. Genomic sequencing will detect all omicron subvariants and coronavirus variants in general.
However, detecting new variants or subvariants may be becoming more difficult as the number of sequences shared across the world have “dropped precipitously,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease specialist with the World Health Organization, said in June. While the impact was still enormous, having real-world data available quickly after scientists detected omicron was a benefit during the worldwide surge last winter.
The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.
App could soon provide at-home test for brain diseases via ‘eye selfies’
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — You may soon be able to screen yourself for neurological diseases like dementia and ADHD using nothing but a smartphone. All you’d have to do is take a selfie — of your eyes. Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are developing a new app that uses eye recordings to assess cognitive health.
The app uses both a near-infrared camera (built into most new smartphones available today) and a “regular selfie camera” to track pupil size dilations. Those pupil measurements can then help to assess a person’s cognitive condition, study authors explain.
“While there is still a lot of work to be done, I am excited about the potential for using this technology to bring neurological screening out of clinical lab settings and into homes,” says first study author Colin Barry, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, in a university release. “We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on.”
The pupils offer a peek into cognitive functioning. For example, when someone is thinking hard about a tough mental task, or hears an unexpected loud sound, the pupils tend to expand.
The app keeps close track of changes in pupil diameter through a pupil response test. Researchers believe this eye-selfie test can quickly screen for and even monitor any number of neurological diseases and disorders.
How does the brain disease app work?
Normally, that test requires specialized and expensive equipment, making it hard to perform consistently outside of a lab setting. Luckily, engineers from the Digital Health Lab, led by UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Edward Wang, worked together with researchers at the UC San Diego Center for Mental Health Technology (MHTech Center) to develop an affordable, easier way to administer the test.
“A scalable smartphone assessment tool that can be used for large-scale community screenings could facilitate the development of pupil response tests as minimally-invasive and inexpensive tests to aid in the detection and understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. This could have a huge public health impact,” adds Eric Granholm, a psychiatry professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the MHTech Center.
The app conceived by the UC San Diego team makes use of smartphones’ near-infrared cameras to detect and track the pupil. Within the near-infrared spectrum, it’s rather easy to differentiate the pupil from the iris, even in eyes with dark iris colors. So, the app is able to calculate pupil size super accurately (to the sub-millimeter!) across numerous eye colors.
Additionally, the app uses a more traditional color picture taken with the smartphone’s selfie camera to measure the stereoscopic distance between the smartphone and the user. The system then converts the pupil size from the near-infrared image into millimeter units.
The new ‘gold standard’ in the palm of your hand?
It’s worth mentioning that measurements made by the app were comparable to those taken by a device called a pupillometer, which scientists consider the gold standard for measuring pupil size. The development team also included a number of features intended to make the app more user friendly for older adults.
“For us, one of the most important factors in technology development is to ensure that these solutions are ultimately usable for anyone. This includes individuals like older adults who might not be accustomed to using smartphones,” Barry explains.
Study authors worked directly with a group of older individuals to design a simple app interface. Features include voice commands, image-based instructions, and an affordable plastic scope to help direct user’s eyes to within the view of the smartphone camera.
“By testing directly with older adults, we learned about ways to improve our system’s overall usability and even helped us innovate older adult specific solutions that make it easier for those with different physical limits to still use our system successfully,” concludes Prof. Wang. “When developing technologies, we must look beyond function as the only metric of success, but understand how our solutions will be utilized by end-users who are very diverse.”
Moving forward, researchers will continue their work on this project. More specifically, they’re now turning their attention toward enabling similar pupillometry functions on older smartphone models. Future studies involving older adults self-screening for dementia are in the planning phase now.
The team presented their findings at the ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022).
Doctor Dismissed Woman’s at-Home Cancer Test, but the Tumor Was Real
- Christine Bronstein took a home colon cancer test after seeing blood in her stool. It was positive.
- Her doctor assured her she didn’t have cancer, but a colonoscopy found she had stage 3.
- She’s undergoing chemo and raising awareness of colorectal cancers, which are on the rise in young people.
When Christine Bronstein saw some blood in her stool last fall, she chalked it up to hemorrhoids. The 48-year-old — known for founding the social network A Band of Wives and her family’s Borders bookstore empire — eats well, avoids sugar, and doesn’t drink alcohol, so she didn’t think it would be serious, she told Today.com.
But Bronstein took an at-home colon cancer test in January to be sure, and the result came back positive. This time, her primary care doctor was the one who wasn’t concerned. He texted her: “You don’t have cancer :)”.
LetsGetChecked
Bronstein, a publisher who lives in Hawaii with her journalist husband Phil Bronstein, pushed for a colonoscopy anyway. She learned she had stage 3 colorectal cancer and a nearly 2-inch tumor in her rectum. She also had two polyps removed that could have become cancerous.
“Thank god I did the Let’s Get Checked home test or I would have waited until 50 and had a very bad prognosis,” Bronstein wrote on Instagram in March. “Please do your check ups. 45 is the new 50 For colorectal cancer screening. Cancer is terrifying, humbling and disorienting. I’m so grateful for my family and all those supporting me already.”
A post shared by Christine Bronstein (@chrisbronstein)
Bronstein is now undergoing chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, which she and doctors hope will be small enough to remove by June. She’s speaking out to raise awareness of colorectal cancer, the no. 2 killer of all cancers but the least funded.
“We can possibly slow the 140% increases in early onset CRC happening by catching them as polyps before they turn into cancer,” she wrote in another Instagram post, adding that the disease disproportionately affects Black and Jewish people. “Butts and guts are the new boobs when it comes to cancer awareness!” she wrote.
Colon cancer is on the rise in younger people
In the past three decades, research has consistently found rising rates of colon cancer and related illnesses like rectal cancer among younger people.
People older than 50 are still at a greater risk of developing colon cancer overall. However, people under 50 are more often diagnosed with hard-to-treat, advanced forms of the disease, Insider previously reported.
Actor Chadwick Boseman died from died of complications related to colon cancer in 2020, four years after a stage-three diagnosis. He was 43.
Bowel cancers can be difficult to diagnose because the symptoms — such as abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, weight loss, and fatigue — are common with ailments like hemorrhoids, inflammatory bowel disease, or irritable bowel syndrome. What’s more, routine testing isn’t offered to many people under 50 in several countries, including the US.
If caught early, colon cancer is very treatable, and the five-year relative survival rate is about 90% if the cancer doesn’t spread, according to the American Cancer Society.
Other young people have reported doctors dismissing their colon cancer symptoms
While Bronstein told Today she doesn’t blame her doctor for assuming she didn’t have cancer, other patients have reported doctors brushing off their symptoms too.
Amanda Lee, a 28-year-old actress and wedding photographer, said she was weight-shamed by a gastroenterologist when she complained of severe stomach pain and
weight loss
.
“He said, ‘Maybe it’s not such a bad thing’ that I couldn’t eat because of my pain,” she told Today Health. “He was praising the fact that I was not eating.” Lee said the doctor didn’t run any tests and sent her home with a prescription for a UTI, which her pharmacist later questioned.
When she went to another provider for a colonoscopy, she was diagnosed with stage 3A colon cancer, meaning it had spread to her lymph nodes. She started chemotherapy and took to TikTok to share her story. “Remember this is your body,” she said in one video, “and they can’t gaslight you.”
COVID: Vulnerable coronavirus patients getting at-home treatment which improves symptoms ‘within hours’ | UK News
More than 32,000 vulnerable COVID patients in England have been treated with “cutting-edge” antiviral drugs which improve symptoms “within hours”, the NHS has said.
The health service has procured nearly five million doses of Pfizer’s Paxlovid and other antivirals, such as Molnupiravir, via a deal struck by the government.
Paxlovid was found in trials to cut coronavirus hospital admissions and deaths by 88% and has been given to more than 6,000 patients already – 1,400 in the last seven days alone.
Molnupiravir, which clinical trials suggest reduces the risk of hospital admission or death by 30%, was approved in November 2021 and has been used as an at-home treatment since December.
‘I was back at work in four days’
Helen West, 56, from Walderslade, Kent, was given Paxlovid after testing positive for COVID and said she felt the difference in less than six hours.
She had initially declined the drug, as she “didn’t feel too bad”.
She added: “I had initially felt fine, just a bit tired, but two days in I had an extremely sore throat, to the point where I couldn’t swallow or talk, and I could barely walk.”
Ms West has ankylosing spondylitis, a rare long-term condition in which the spine and other parts of the body become inflamed, painful, and stiff, requiring her to take medication that suppresses her immune system.
As her joints became painful, she changed her mind and phoned the hospital to request it.
“The process was so quick and efficient,” she said.
“Within six hours of taking the first tablet, I felt a very slight improvement. After four days, I was back to work.
“COVID hit me hard, but Paxlovid really made a positive difference to my recovery.”
Read more:
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How are the drugs being administered – and are you eligible?
The drugs are being used to treat those identified to be at the highest risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID or of being admitted to hospital, in line with government guidance.
The treatment stops the virus from multiplying in cells, helping patients to fight the infection and get better, faster.
They are currently only being prescribed by clinicians on a case-by-case basis, but the health secretary says others might be eligible as part of a trial.
Sajid Javid said: “Both of our groundbreaking antivirals – Molnupiravir and Paxlovid – are available to those most vulnerable to the virus directly through the NHS, and it’s fantastic to see 32,000 patients reaping the benefits.
“For anyone not in this high-risk group, if you’re aged 50 and over or 18 to 49 with an underlying health condition and test positive, you can sign up to the PANORAMIC study to potentially access this treatment too.”
At-home COVID tests shipped through cold weather might not be accurate
COVID-19: Tips to find at-home tests
Starting January 19, Americans will be able to have at-home COVID-19 tests shipped to their homes, for free.
Staff Video, USA TODAY
At the same time most Americans are facing cold fronts and winter storms, they’re also expecting their at-home COVID-19 tests from the government to arrive in the mail.
Most at-home COVID-19 test brands recommend storing the tests above 35 degrees. The liquid reagent inside the cartridge that comes with the at-home tests is susceptible to freezing, and if that happens, the accuracy of the results decreases, Cindy Prins, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, told USA TODAY.
With the federal government launching a program to send free at-home COVID-19 tests to Americans who sign up through the website COVIDTests.gov, 1 billion tests have been ordered for distribution via the U.S. Postal Service.
But could prolonged cold or freezing temperatures affect the results of the government-sent tests? It depends on how long it’s been cold, experts said.
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Nursing homes and COVID tests: At nursing homes, long waits for results render COVID tests ‘useless’
What does it mean if your at-home tests comes in the mail and it’s cold?
Dr. Geoffrey Baird, Chair, chair of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, said the issue with the at-home tests is that if the liquid inside the cartridge is frozen, the results can be skewed.
If the test is outside for a few hours, odds are the test is fine, although not as accurate as it once was. If your test is in your mailbox for a day or more, Baird advises using a PCR test instead. Baird said if your test spent a night in your mailbox in 25-degree weather, it may be best to order another test.
“Just as anything with liquid, if it’s chilled or frozen, it changes. That’s the same with these at-home tests,” Baird said. “At a time where temperatures are freezing in most places, it’s safer to choose another test.”
Most studies have found a change in the temperature of the at-home test may result in a false-negative test rather than a false-positive, she added. She said if someone is exposed and tests negative with the at-home test, they should receive a PCR test to confirm the results.
“The sensitivity to coronavirus on these tests can be decreased with temperature changes, and it’s always tricky to tell by how much,” Prins said. “But more often than not, a wrong test shows a false-positive, so then you should get a PCR test.”
Antigen tests exposed for extended periods of time to temperatures below 36 degrees or above 86 degrees can deliver inaccurate results, according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health.
“Consequences may include false-negative test results,” the researchers wrote. “Storage and operation of [antigen tests] at recommended conditions is essential for successful usage during the pandemic.”
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What to do if your test comes in the mail cold or frozen
As soon as you get an email confirming your at-home test has arrived, Prins recommended immediately storing it indoors. If the test arrives cold, the room temperature environment will help thaw the liquid inside. But Prins said not to place the test in immediate sun because high temperatures can also affect the results.
“Your best bet is room temperature. Nothing colder or hotter because the test is sensitive to those temperatures,” Prinssaid.
Baird recommends waiting at least four to five hours before using the cold or frozen at-home test. Fortunately, the packaging of the tests was created to be durable through the shipping and arrival process.
The U.S. Postal Service said tests will ship within 7-12 days of ordering and all orders are mailed through First Class Package Service.
Abbott BinaxNOW recommends that its tests remain between 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit and 86 degrees Fahrenheit, adding “test kit reagents must be at room temperature before use,” a spokesperson for Abbott told USA TODAY.
However if a test is stored outside the recommended temperature “for a relatively short period of time,” it will be fine to use after being placed back in room temperature, the spokesperson said.
If the test lines on your at-home test appear in the incorrect order or color, Baird said that’s an indicator it’s been contaminated by the weather.
“When you freeze and thaw something, the solutions in it may not actually get back into solution as it once was before. That’s where the inaccuracy in these at-home tests can come from,” Baird said.
Follow Gabriela Miranda on Twitter: @itsgabbymiranda
At-home COVID-19 tests could be more affordable thanks to your smartphone
Ever since the omicron variant arrived in the US, there’s been a testing shortage in the country. Stuck between long lines at dedicated clinics and overly expensive at-home tests, many Americans have understandably given up the idea of getting tested to ensure they’re not sick with COVID-19. However, a solution to some of those problems could be on the way.
University of California, Santa Barbara
In a newly published spotted by , researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, detailed a system you can start using for about $100 should you already have access to a relatively modern phone. What’s more, they say early results show their process is nearly as accurate as a PCR test (and thankfully doesn’t involve tickling your brain).
In its current iteration, the system involves downloading the team’s app to your phone, as well as making use of a hot plate and a cardboard box with a LED light. When you need to test yourself, you place a saliva sample onto a testing kit that costs about $7. You then drop a reactive solution that makes it easier for your phone’s rear camera to detect any viral RNA in the sample. The solution turns a bright red as it bonds with the viral material in your saliva. The Bacticount app then conducts a real-time analysis based on how quickly the solution turns red.
As you might imagine, there’s still plenty of work to be done before you can start using the SmaRT-LAMP test at home. The initial study is based on a small sample size involving 50 symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. Moreover, the Bacticount app is so far only optimized to work with the Samsung Galaxy S9. Still, the system shows promise. While it was developed primarily to aid with testing in places that don’t have access to adequate resources, Dr. Michael Mann, the lead researcher on the project, told Gizmodo that it could be adapted for at-home use. He also said it could be modified to detect new COVID-19 variants and other pathogens like the flu.
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