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At the Florida Capitol on Tuesday, Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie ran into Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried. He had news for her. The federal government has agreed to give Florida another three-month extension to use the nearly one million rapid COVID-19 test kits that expired in a state warehouse at the end of December, Guthrie said. (Wilson, 1/11)

Faced with rising COVID-19 hospitalizations and increasingly crowded conditions, Kentucky hospitals are asking the public to stop using emergency rooms for routine tests for the virus. "We are running into a lot of problems with patients coming into the emergency department simply for testing," Dr. Mark Spanier, medical director of the emergency department of Baptist Health Lexington, said on a press call Tuesday. "If you show up for routine testing, you'll be delaying care of other patients," he said. (Yetter, 1/11)

After a record-breaking day last week of COVID-19 tests, officials at Sonora Quest Laboratories said Tuesday that Arizona’s largest diagnostic testing lab will expand its operation and be able to take on thousands more samples. Sonora Quest went through almost 30,000 COVID-19 PCR tests on Jan. 4, the most since the pandemic began. It receives specimens from patient service centers and dozens of collection sites like drive-thru test lines, along with Banner Health facilities in six states. (Tang, 1/11)

Full-time Google employees have access to at-home COVID-19 tests for themselves and their families, but that’s not the case for thousands of company contractors and temporary workers, according to a Google engineer. A Google spokesperson said in an email the company has free, at-home and in-person testing options available to employees as well as temps and vendors. But Ashok Chandwaney, a software engineer at Google and member of the Alphabet Workers Union, said in a statement that access was unequal for the company’s contingent workforce. (DeFeliciantonio, 1/11)

During these hard times, at least one thing should should soon get easier: Getting tested for Covid-19. Starting Saturday, many people will be able to get free at-home tests, thanks to a new initiative by the Biden Administration. Here’s what you need to know. (Nova, 1/11)

A Houston Health Department online portal that delivers COVID-19 test results was disabled Tuesday due to a technical glitch. The outage applies to tests conducted at the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center, the Hiram Clark Multi-Service Center, the Magnolia Multi-Service Center and the Southwest Multi-Service Center. The four city-run clinics each offer about 250 walk-up COVID testing spots daily on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Mishanec, 1/11)

In general, tests are able to reveal an Omicron infection, but enough virus needs to have reproduced and appear at sufficiently high levels in the nose or saliva to be detectable, according to Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and former professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, whose interview on the podcast “In the Bubble,” hosted by former White House COVID-19 advisor Andy Slavitt, published this week. “Omicron does appear to be more infectious, so it might be taking off and actually spreading the first day or two before there’s enough virus in your nose to turn the [rapid] antigen test positive — or the PCR test positive, for that matter,” Mina said on the podcast. “You might already be infectious, and that’s potentially because the virus now is just so able to potentially aerosolize and get out of people at lower amounts.” (Lin II and Money, 1/11)

Throughout the pandemic, companies big and small have responded to the call for widely available Covid-19 testing. It’s not just a public good: Supplying a flood of new diagnostics, digital backbones for data sharing, and on-site infrastructure is good business, and most companies are trying to capitalize on the demand for testing as much as possible, for as long as possible. But at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week, some of the biggest names in Covid-19 testing described the challenge of hitting that constantly moving target. (Palmer, 1/12)

Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor participated in Tuesday’s oral arguments remotely. A court spokesperson said Breyer had a false positive COVID-19 rapid test Tuesday morning and participated in arguments remotely from his chambers “out of an abundance of caution.” “As part of routine testing, Justice Breyer took a COVID-19 rapid test this morning prior to oral argument and the result was positive. That test has now been determined to be a false positive,” said court spokesperson Patricia McCabe. ... Sotomayor, who suffers from type 1 diabetes, an additional risk factor, has participated in oral arguments remotely since last week. (Kruzel, 1/11)