email article Though the push is on to make at-home COVID-19 tests much more widely available, patients and their clinicians should be aware of downsides that could diminish their accuracy, experts from the College of American Pathologists warned at a news conference Thursday. They cautioned that in addition to being uncomfortable to administer at home and possibly not covered by insurance, such tests may produce inadequate sample material and could be damaged by improper handling, thus producing false results. It's also unclear whether any or some of the at-home tests -- particularly those detecting viral antigens -- are capable of picking up all of the variants that are increasingly circulating around the country, they said.