Can I get a coronavirus test at home or not?

The FDA has authorized at-home collection for saliva coronavirus tests. | Claudio Reyes / AFP via Getty Images

The FDA authorized an at-home spit test for the coronavirus, but the future of rapid at-home tests isn’t here yet. For weeks now, the federal government has issued warnings to the American public about deceptive or just plain crooked companies selling at-home coronavirus test kits that weren’t authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — despite some of them claiming that they were. That’s now changed.
If you want to get tested for Covid-19 without leaving your home, you now have two FDA-authorized options to choose from. On May 7, the FDA granted an emergency use authorization for at-home saliva collection for Covid-19 tests developed by a lab at Rutgers University. The lab, RUCDR Infinite Biologics , joins LabCorp’s Pixel at-home nasal swab test, which was authorized by the FDA on April 21. (You can find a current list of FDA-authorized tests here .)
This should mean, depending on availability, you can now spit in a tube from the comfort of your living room to find out if you have Covid-19. For many, that’s a more attractive prospect than shoving a swab up your nose. The Pixel test lets you get tested for the coronavirus from home, but unlike some of the “ getting stabbed in the brain ” diagnostic tests we’ve seen, it does not require the swab to be inserted too far. Still, the saliva-based test seems like the less painful option.
Of course, the test is not as simple as just spitting in your house. With a doctor’s order, you have to buy a kit and follow the directions, which include spitting under the supervision of a health care professional via telehealth. Then you must properly package and ship the test back to the lab. The Rutgers lab is currently the only one authorized to process the tests, which are sold by at least two kit distributors: 1Health.io and Vault Health , which lists the price of a test at $150.
“With at-home testing, individuals now have access to testing without the fear of exposure to the virus or wasting scarce PPE used in nasal swab test environments,” Vault Health CEO Jason Feldman told Recode.
Due in part to the FDA wanting to get as many tests as possible out there, Covid-19 tests have operated in a bit of a regulatory gray area. This has some drawbacks. While the at-home collection spit test is newly authorized, distributors like 1Health.io and Vault Health have been allowed to market their at-home saliva tests for weeks now, due to the FDA’s policy of allowing diagnostic tests to be sold as long as they submitted for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and passed their own validation tests. Until today, 1Health.io only sold its tests to health care providers to distribute to their patients until it received the authorization, but it’s now selling directly to consumers, too.
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