FLORIDA, USA — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the state has acquired the ability to send out up to a million at home COVID-19 tests, starting with nursing homes and long term care facilities.
He elaborated during a news conference in West Palm Beach that he is once again putting the focus on senior-heavy communities, as he did when the pandemic first began.
He says if you're young and healthy, you don't need to be going out getting tested every day unless you have symptoms.
By monitoring demand across the state, he says he hopes to be able to expand the at-home testing kits to other places, not just nursing homes.
"We're in a situation now where we understand the deal here, most people are gonna be fine, but if we do have vulnerable, whether it's Omicron or Delta, get that at home test and then get the treatment," said DeSantis.
Before speaking in West Palm, DeSantis made an appearance on "Fox & Friends" where he denounced President Biden administration’s handling of the testing crisis.
"The Biden administration promised they were going to send all these at-home tests," DeSantis said on Fox & Friends. "They said all you had to do is go online and get it, and nothing has happened in a month and a half with doing that."
Biden said the federal government will be launching a website this month where you can get an at-home COVID test shipped to your home for free. As of Thursday, the website has not yet been launched.
The U.S. has set new records for daily reported COVID-19 cases and Biden is facing new pressure to ease a nationwide testing shortage, as people seek to determine if they or their family members have been infected with the variant.
DeSantis is also urging the Biden administration to send more doses of the treatment to Florida, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services is not supplying the state with enough doses to meet the demand.
“We’re ready, we’ve prepared but they’re not sending us the doses," DeSantis said during a news conference in Jacksonville. "And so we just got the announcement from HHS and Florida was allocated less than 12,000 doses. And to put that in perspective, we were doing 4,500 a day at the summer peak in August."
The governor called the allocation of 12,000 doses "totally inadequate."