At-Home COVID-19 Testing: Convenience, Cost, Caveats Experts agree that COVID-19 testing has had its challenges and has evolved over the past year. "It's a very, very significant day," Kisha Mitchell Richards, MD, director of pathology and laboratory at Greenwich Hospital, in Greenwich, CT, said during a March 11 webinar on COVID-19. The webinar was sponsored by the College of American Pathologists (CAP). "It's 1 year ago today that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and basically set in stone a year that was going to change our lives probably forever," Richards said. During that time, "PCR testing" became more of a household term, community and preoperative testing changed and expanded, and the FDA granted emergency use authorization for more at-home tests. Among them is the first molecular-based at-home test, which was authorized last week.