Now that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the Fifth Circuit’s stay of OSHA’s ETS on COVID-19 vaccination and testing for employers with at least 100 employees, you’ll probably be looking … and looking for at-home tests.
Good luck because right now finding an at-home test is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That’s because of the recent spread of the omicron variant and the continuing spread of the delta variant.
But don’t freak out!
Administration’s plan
President Biden plans to take steps to make at-home COVID-19 tests available. He based his campaign on making testing cheap and widely available. To do that, the administration plans on:
- buying 500 million rapid COVID-19 tests so it can distribute them for free to anyone in need, and
- setting up federal testing sites around the country to help states that need additional testing. (The first one will be in New York City and ready this week.)
“We’ve invested $3 billion to expand the number of at home tests,” a senior administration official said. “There are now 20,000 free testing sites across the United States. We made sure that all insurance covers PCR testing, and we’re sending out 15 million tests to help people without private insurance.”
Available via website
The 500 million tests will be available in January via a website the administration is setting up. This way, people can order them to be delivered directly to their homes.
No word on if businesses will be allowed to buy from the government website, but if employees can, that’ll lift some of the burden off businesses. So once the website is up and running, make sure your employees know about it.
The other thing you can do is continue to encourage employees to get vaccinated. Let them know they’ll be given time off to get it and time off to recover if they experience any side effects.
And remind them that with the OSHA ETS now set to take place, it’ll be easier on them to get vaccinated than be tested every week or wear a mask while at work.
