US to offer free COVID tests

US health officials said on Friday the government’s free COVID-19 test delivery programs would reopen in late September, in time for the holiday season, and that they had launched an educational campaign targeting those at risk of severe disease.

The free testing program would be launched “as families start to move indoors this fall and begin spending time with their loved ones, both very old and very young,” Dawn O’Connell, an official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters.

The measures come as the rate of COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the United States has increased in the last three months.

Hospitalizations associated with COVID jumped from 1.1 per 100,000 people at the beginning of May to 4.4 at the beginning of August.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved updated mRNA COVID vaccines on Thursday, targeting a recently circulating variant, to better protect the population heading into the fall and winter.

The updated vaccines include those made by Pfizer, its German partner BioNTech and Moderna.

However, the FDA did not clear Novavax’s traditional protein-based shot.