It is well known that the official COVID numbers represented in the CDC maps are undercounts—for many reasons, including that many state and local public health departments are no longer reporting cases regularly, and because the results from home tests aren't included. Up until now, there's been no easy way to report an at-home rapid antigen test. That has changed, recently, however. The National Institutes of Health have released a website where you can anonymously report at-home rapid antigen tests. The NIH explains:
Reporting a positive or negative test result just became easier through a new website from the National Institutes of Health. MakeMyTestCount.org, developed through NIH's Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx®) Tech program, allows users to anonymously report the results of any brand of at-home COVID-19 test.
COVID-19 testing remains an essential tool as the United States heads into the holiday season and people navigate respiratory viruses. While taking a rapid COVID-19 test has become commonplace, test results are not often reported. COVID-19 test results provide valuable data that public health departments can use to assess the needs and modify the responses in the local community, the state or the nation.
Lab tests have a well-established technology system for sharing test results. RADx Tech has been working on a system to standardize test reporting for at-home tests in a secure manner. The MakeMyTestCount.org website is built on this system for logging test results.
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) supported development of MakeMyTestCount.org through the RADx Tech program.
Here's the website to report your home tests. And if you're concerned about privacy, the website makes it very clear that: "Your answers are anonymous, secure, and cannot be traced back to you."
This won't suddenly solve all of the issues with official counts under-representing the actual risks of COVID transmission, but it's a step in the right direction.
