US President Donald Trump laid out the administration’s swab testing efforts during Friday’s briefing.
In the next few weeks, he said, the federal government will “be sending out 5.5 million testing swabs to the states.”
The swabs, he said, “can be done easily by the governors themselves. Mostly it’s cotton. It’s not a big deal, you can get cotton easily, but if they can’t get it, we will take care of it.”
People might soon be able to perform their own test swabs for Covid-19 at home with a newly designed, Q-tip-style swab, the FDA said Thursday.
CNN reported the FDA said it had worked with US Cotton to design the swabs, which are shorter than the swabs used by technicians, doctors or nurses to collect samples to test people for Covid-19 infection. The FDA also said US Cotton plans to manufacture large quantities of these swabs.