Kroger Health, a division of the Kroger Company has received FDA ‘emergency use authorization’ for a home collection test kit for COVID-19.  Patients and Kroger workers will be provided access to a dedicated Kroger website to answer screening questions and to register a unique code.  Qualified patients requesting a test will be supplied with the nasal swab, transport vial, an instruction sheet and prepaid shipping label.  Patients will be provided with tele-health guidance to ensure that samples are obtained correctly.  Patients will ship the swab to Gravity Diagnostics clinical laboratory in Covington, KY.  The laboratory will conduct a molecular diagnostic test indicating active infection with SARS-CoV-2 the causal virus responsible for COVID-19.  Negative results will be remitted to an electronic medical record portal.  Patients with positive results will be contacted by a healthcare professional.  Test results will only be accessible to a patient and shared with their organization according to authorization.

Kroger has conducted more than 100,000 tests across nineteen states and anticipates processing 60,000 tests per week by the end of July. Given the structure of the program those wishing to be tested for antigen will be subject to a delay of at least four days from the time of initiating the request to receiving results. This is too long a period to enable quarantine to be effected. The program and technology will soon be rendered obsolete by sensitive lateral flow immunoassay kits that will provide a suitable home-screening assay similar to a pregnancy test within 30 minutes. Presumptive positive results can then be confirmed by more specific molecular assay.