The Federal Government is back again in 2024 with offers to ship free Covid tests to Americans. This includes Mainers. This article explains how you can find or request free Covid test kits.
Free test kits from the Federal government
Once again, the Federal government is making free Covid test kits available to Americans who request them. However, there is a caveat: if you got test kits in the last go-around of free kits, you cannot order them this time.
Every home in the U.S. is eligible to order an four free at-home tests. Each order includes four individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests. This offer begins immediately and the kits start shipping on September 30. Your order of COVID tests is completely free – you won’t even pay for shipping as the USPS sends them for free.
You can use this link to request your free tests. Every household in the United States is eligible.
Covid test expiration dates
People started getting Covid tests to use at home in 2021 or 2022. And you may have some that you haven’t used yet that seem to have expired. That may not be true.
Some of the Covid test manufacturers have extended the expiration dates, with the FDA’s blessings. That’s because further research determined that these tests would continue to perform as expected, even after the expiration date on the package had come and gone.
Many tests had an expiration date extended between 21 and 24 months from the original expiration date. You can check the FDA website for included tests.
I just checked the Covid tests that we have. All appear to have expired. This includes:
- Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test from Acon Laboratories
- Clinitest Rapid COVID-19 Antigen Self-Test from Siemens Healthineers
- QuickVue At-Home OTC COVID-19 Test from Quidel
Some of these boxes have stickers that show an extended expiration date. For example, the Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test from Acon Laboratories says this on the side of the box:
“Disregard Exp. Date printed on the pouch. Note: New Exp. Date above.”
And that date is 11/5/2023, so definitely expired now. What was the original date on the pouch? 2/6/2022. The Quidel test had an expiration date of 3/6/2023. However, according to the FDA, that expiration date was extended four months only, to 7/6/2023.
However, the Clinitest Rapid COVID-19 Antigen Self-Test from Siemens Heathlineers was supposed to expire in December 2022. According to the FDA, the new expiration date was January 2024.
So, at this time, all of the Covid tests we’d previously gotten for free from the U.S. government are all now expired. The only exception: the Covid tests we ordered this time last year when this offer was valid in 2023. However, we’ve since used a few of them when we had Covid scares this summer. We definitely need to order more, just to be safe.
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