The US government’s site to claim free COVID tests, which has started accepting orders a day before it was scheduled to, is drawing in a lot of visitors — more than every other government page combined, according to the government’s own analytics site.
Web traffic numbers change by the second, but at 1:32PM ET, when I ran the report to download real-time numbers for all governmental pages, COVIDTests.gov (along with its FAQ page and versions of the site in other languages) had 685,817 visitors. The visitor counts for the 3,853 other pages included in the report totaled 419,615. Traffic doesn’t seem to have dropped since then.
There have been concerns that the site wouldn’t be able to handle the load since it was announced. So far, though, it seems to be handling the rush — though it’s always possible we could see an even bigger wave of visitors on the site tomorrow, the date the general public was told it would go live.
That’s not to say that things have been perfectly smooth. Several people have reported that living in an apartment building can cause issues, with some residents receiving an error message that tests had already been ordered for their address. As the Associated Press reports, it’s hard to tell how widespread the issue is, and there have been conflicting reports on how to solve it.
The government has committed to sending out 500 million tests, with a limit of four per household. If you’re looking to order yours, you can read our guide on how to do so here.
