Expiration date madness

[LCHIEN]

This is not a political comment.

I read that you could get more COVID tests from the government for free. Up to 8 per person in fact so having just had COVID and used up all I had I ordered 8 for me and 8 for my wife.
They came August 13 and they all had an expiration date of 9/7/2022.
So Basically they have a remaining shelf life of 3 weeks. And then most people would throw them away.
Stupid government.

So actually the printed expiration date on COVID test kits has been extended after testing has proven they have longer shelf lives than initially expected. A fact that most people don't know. Looking up the FDA list the kits I have have been extended dates to 12/7/22. They were manufactured in January 2022 so even with the date extension more than 65% of the shelf life is gone. Is anyone at the government checking this stuff? Is there any intelligence at the federal level?

The whole issue of expiration dates sets me off anyways.

[Dedpedal]

There’s so much about Covid,the vaccines,masks and testing kits that’s either unknown otherwise misread information. See who stands to make money and you’ll have your information. I’ve grown to just deal with what directly affects me and my family. Govt waste has been an issue forever and won’t be going away anytime soon. Stay safe and sound out there. It’s a tough world.

[Jim Frye]

Gov. waste is a given, even at the local level. Toledo, OH has some of the dumbest departments. Communication within the various departments is so poor, they instituted a sort of hot line to provide a single point of contact for the citizens to log issues or questions for the various departments. It is a single point of contact and has proven to be a single point of failure to communicate. Local TV station ran a segment on an issue yesterday. It was an abandoned home that has been empty for almost ten years. Three years ago, the city put a condemned property sign on the front door plywood stating the house would be torn down. Neighbors have been calling the "hot line" for the last two years with no results. The department responsible for tearing down abandoned properties claims they will get to it, but they have over 11,000 to do and also claims they have heard of no recent complaints about this particular property. A few years ago, the Emerald Ash Borer problem required that those trees had to be removed and our 30 year old street had a couple of dozen lining the street. It took a city crew two weeks to remove the stumps. Typical city crew, four man crew with one working and three watching. I watched a single person clear a one acre woods in four days, stumps and all.

[cwsmith]

Note too that the expiration date on the outside of the test carton is different than on the test fluid container. For example, I have a "iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test (orange and white box) showing a Use by date of 2022-06-30. But on the plastic "Extraction Reagent Tube it has a "Use by" date of 2023-12-25. There is no expiration date on the card, and the expiration date on the swab is 2024-12-14.

So if the inside products, the actual test items, have a longer date, then why is the box short dated? Does that mean we should just throw the box away earlier and stick the test paraphernalia in storage until we need it or it too expires?

I called our County Health Dept. and of course they didn't know. But I wouldn't expect them too anyway. They're the people I called when this whole thing broke out and they didn't know. After a few days they wouldn't even answer their phones, just giving a recorded message that "there were no vacination appointments available at this time".

I asked my pharmacist about this and she told me that she and her husband called every few minutes over the course of two weeks in order to get the vaccination for her elderly mother. Personally, I called a national hotline several times a day over the course of two weeks, I finally got connected to a nice lady located in South Carolina (I'm in NY), and she gave us a local appointment (the National Guard had set up a facility about a mile from us) the next afternoon and a second appointment five days later.

So, my wife and I went to the tented-facility that next afternoon and the interviewer asked about my wife (my wife was insistant that I get the shot first [she wanted to see how I reacted, as we heard so many stories]). The guy was very nice and said we both could have them at the same time. We questioned that because we only had the one appointment and he expained that at the end of their day (8:00 pm), they had at least 75 shots left over because people didn't show up; "just tell your neighbors" was his comment. As it stood, we got our first vaccination on January 30, 2021. Since then we've received whatever "boosters" there have been and I believe next month another is due. We're waiting for that to be announced. Meanwhile, we're still wearing masks when we go shopping and generally refrain from 'mass contamination events'!

From my perspective the political appointee's, at least at the County level, were not at all helpful. Out local Health Commissioner offered very little but managed to get herself on the local TV stations, only to say they were working on it. When the initial phase was past, she gladly took all the bows and then left to grab a higher position, I believe down in Pennsylvania.

CWS

[LCHIEN]

Note too that the expiration date on the outside of the test carton is different than on the test fluid container. For example, I have a "iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test (orange and white box) showing a Use by date of 2022-06-30. But on the plastic "Extraction Reagent Tube it has a "Use by" date of 2023-12-25. There is no expiration date on the card, and the expiration date on the swab is 2024-12-14.

So if the inside products, the actual test items, have a longer date, then why is the box short dated? Does that mean we should just throw the box away earlier and stick the test paraphernalia in storage until we need it or it too expires?

...

CWS

How the heck does a Q-tip have an expiration date?

This is expiration date madness.

[Brian G]

The expiration is for sterility assurance in the finished packaging, when stored under normal (basically ambient temperature and humidity) conditions.

[dbhost]

The one I laugh about is the expiration date on bottles of Syrup of Ipecac or however you spell that stuff that makes you throw up. Like it will make you sick or something?

[LCHIEN]

This is the one that gets me.
Himalayan sea salt
250 million years old but it expires in a month
Good thing it was harvested just in time.

[cwsmith]

Reading the ingredients I find myself confused. All this while I was under the impression that "SEA" salt was refined from an evaporation process using ocean or sea water. So after reading your post that your example of "Himalayan Sea Salt" made me wonder if I'd missed some geography as I didn't remember a sea hign in the Himalayra's. Doing a quick Google I see this: https://www.ecowatch.com/9-different...891079937.html



CWS

[LCHIEN]

Apparently the Himalayas were under the sea at one point. A long time ago... 250 million years.