Biden announces US will buy another 500 million at-home COVID-19 tests to send to Americans for free

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Biden announces US will buy another 500 million at-home COVID-19 tests to send to Americans for free
President Joe Biden.AP Photo/Evan Vucci
  • Biden said the US would buy an additional 500 million COVID-19 tests to send to Americans for free.
  • That would bring the total number of free at-home rapid tests for Americans to 1 billion.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that his administration planned to buy another 500 million at-home rapid COVID-19 tests to send to Americans for free.

"Today, I'm directing my team to procure an additional 500 million more tests to distribute for free," Biden said as he delivered an update on the White House's response to surging COVID-19 cases across the nation.

The new order brings the total number of at-home rapid COVID-19 tests set to be delivered for free to 1 billion. Biden last month initially announced that his administration would purchase 500 million rapid tests to send to Americans starting in January. That decision came amid a rise in demand for tests driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

The White House expects to roll out a website this week for Americans to order the tests to ship to their homes, Biden said.

Still, the president reminded Americans that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 was "the single most important thing to determine your outcome in this pandemic."

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"Vaccines are safe. They're free. They're widely available," he said on Thursday, encouraging the unvaccinated to get their shots.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-diseases expert, said on Wednesday that the Omicron variant's "unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility" would likely "find just about everybody."

But Fauci went on to distinguish the different risks for vaccinated and unvaccinated people should they get Omicron, which makes up about 95% of new COVID-19 cases in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Those who have been vaccinated, and vaccinated and boosted, would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death," Fauci said.

Those who are unvaccinated "are going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this," he added.

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The US reported almost 1 million new coronavirus infections a day, more than 150,000 hospitalizations, and 1,200 average daily deaths, Fauci said.

More than 208 million people in the US — or 62.7% of the population — were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the latest data from the CDC.

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