John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center 1/18/2022
US Confirmed Infections Total: 67,524,239

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"New Government Website for Ordering Covid Tests Is Up and Running"

"Visitors can go to covidtests.gov and click through to a Postal Service web page where they can order four tests per household, free of charge. The website quietly went live on Tuesday — a day in advance of its formal launch — and demand already appeared to be significant.

A combined total of more than 1 million visitors were on the home page and the ordering page of covidtests.gov at one point Tuesday evening — more than 40 times as many as were on the government site with the next highest traffic, the U.S. Postal Service’s package-tracking page, according to analytics.usa.gov, which monitors traffic on participating federal websites. At a White House news conference on Tuesday, President Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the official launch would take place on Wednesday morning, but that the site had begun taking orders during what she described as a “beta testing phase” conducted by the U.S. Digital Service, the government’s technology support division."

Matching testing supply with demand has been a persistent challenge for both the Trump and Biden administrations, and Mr. Biden has come under criticism for not ramping up the supply of rapid at-home tests quickly enough as Americans struggled to get tested amid the emergence of the Omicron variant. But the Omicron variant has put an intense strain on the supply of both laboratory and in-home tests. Not long after Thanksgiving, the rapid tests began quickly disappearing off pharmacy shelves, and there were long lines at clinics for polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., tests. The Biden administration responded by ordering a billion at-home tests to give out free to the public, in two 500-million batches. The second batch will not be available until the spring, administration officials have said. The administration is also making free rapid tests available at community health centers and rural health clinics." New York Times

We order our tests early Tuesday afternoon... Just after the Web Site went live.

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"The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Thing to Know

"Officials warned that Omicron has not yet peaked nationally and that there’s no guarantee the variant will lead to enough natural immunity to end the pandemic.”
The New York Times