Starting in January, Americans should be able to order at-home COVID-19 tests through a government-run website, said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, in a press conference on Tuesday.
The specifics of the program and website are still murky, as the government is currently "working through ... very important details," including how many tests a family can order at one time and what the website will look like, Psaki said. The website will be available as soon as the at-home tests are available, she said.
The White House announced Tuesday that it is working to ship out as many as 500 million at-home test kits to Americans and is opening new testing sites as cases begin to spike due to the quickly-spreading omicron variant of COVID-19.
This isn't the first time the government had bold plans for a large-scale testing website. In the early stages of the pandemic, former president Trump had plans for a website in partnership with Google to determine whether people should get tested, but the website quickly fell short of the capabilities that Trump had promised.