My son recently tested positive, so I looked through my various tests that I’ve gathered over time and noticed that a lot of them are expired. However, the FDA is now extending the expiration date for lots of the tests:
I imagine they kept the expiration dates short initially, since they no one knew how long they would work, but more data has come in. Anyway, take a look before you throw away all of your expired tests!
This was really useful a few weeks ago when my daughter and I were exposed to three people who had Covid. We had a bunch of “expired” tests, but when I looked them up online, only four of them were past the extended dates (we used the ones that were only a couple of weeks past it). I’m assuming they were fine; the control stripes came up normally, but we didn’t get a positive result. Neither of us got sick, either, so that’s good enough for me!
The whole home test situation frustrates me a bit. If you test positive, you have Covid and need to isolate. But if it’s negative, well, you’ll need to keep quarantining and retesting for ten days because while a positive result is conclusive, a negative one isn’t.