COVID is surging again. Here’s when home tests can still help

At-home tests were a breakthrough in the COVID pandemic, but for a lot of people, they may seem like a relic now, as the virus becomes less devastating and more familiar.

But infectious disease experts say the test kits are still useful, especially when cases surge, as they are doing now. If the tests aren’t expired and people are using them correctly, they say, the home kits still can help prevent serious illness and protect the most vulnerable members of the community.

“In 2026, the way that we’re thinking about COVID tests is a little bit different than early in the pandemic,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF. “The overall feeling I have is that you test when you can take some action because of it.”

Home test kits at one point were key tools in the pandemic arsenal, empowering people to protect themselves and others when the virus was still raging across the country and threatening lives and health care systems. Now, vaccines and treatments remain critical — updated COVID shots were made available last week — but testing has slipped many people’s minds.

Infectious disease experts acknowledged that home test kits can be expensive and may be unnecessary in many cases. Though the test results are generally reliable if used after a person has become symptomatic, they are not useful if someone does not have symptoms, even if there is a known exposure to COVID. 

“They can give you false negative results … if done too early, and sometimes could require repeat testing on subsequent days,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease expert at Stanford.

For most healthy adults and children, there probably isn’t much reason for testing other than just curiosity, said Dr. Brad Hare, an infectious disease expert at Kaiser in San Francisco. If someone has symptoms of COVID — including fever, sore throat, body aches and headache — they should be staying home and not exposing others regardless of whether they test positive.

In other words, a negative test is not permission to go out in the world if someone is sick, said Chin-Hong. But he added that a positive test might “put an exclamation point” on the need to stay home.

“We say, ‘Stay home when you’re sick,’” Chin-Hong said. “But there’s ‘Stay home when you’re sick, exclamation point,’ and people feel a little more responsible about it, I think.”

Another reason to test is that masking guidelines are different for COVID than for other respiratory illnesses, though infectious disease experts noted that people probably should be masking more often in general. For COVID, doctors recommend people stay home until their symptoms are improving, then mask for five days after that.

“The disease is not as severe as it used to be, and our guidance has evolved to fall more in line with what we do for influenza,” said Hare. But “if we all wanted to do our best,” he added, people would wear masks and stay home for all respiratory infections. “The question is, how much are we willing to do as a society to drop those rates of infection lower?” he said.

The main reason to test is for treatment, since clinicians typically want confirmation before prescribing COVID medications. So people should test themselves if they plan to take Paxlovid, for example.

“Having the information is really powerful because then you can act on it. You can rule out other things like bacterial infections that you would get antibiotics for,” Hare said. 

“We wouldn’t give you treatment based on symptoms alone,” he added. “But an at-home test is perfectly fine.”

It’s important to test early, as soon as symptoms show up, because COVID medications must be given within the first five days of illness to work best. In addition to Paxlovid, treatments include remdesivir, which is given intravenously. Paxlovid is a pill that people take for five days.

Paxlovid is recommended for people 65 and older or people who are immune compromised or otherwise vulnerable to severe infection. Chin-Hong noted that the drug can have bad interactions with some medications, and people for whom Paxlovid is recommended should talk to their care providers ahead of time about whether and how they should take it if they get sick.

There is also now a drug to prevent infection if someone has a known exposure. So if one person in a household tests positive for COVID, others may take this drug, called ensitrelvir, for five days to lower their risk of also getting sick.

“Just yesterday I saw an elderly couple in the hospital, one person had COVID and the wife didn’t — it would be those kinds of situations” for ensitrelvir, Chin-Hong said. 

Another reason for testing is long COVID — but mostly for insurance reasons. In order to get a long COVID diagnosis, a person needs to have tested positive for COVID. But they may no longer be positive by the time long COVID symptoms arise. 

It’s not a common problem, said Hare. But it’s something worth thinking about for those worried about long COVID.

“Knowing that you had COVID is a prerequisite to long COVID,” Hare said. “It’s a minor reason to test, but for people who are concerned, knowing is helpful.”