The Biden administration will distribute 500 million free at-home Covid-19 testing kits to Americans and take steps to deploy federal medical personnel to overburdened hospitals this winter, as the Omicron variant spreads around the country.

President Biden will outline the plan during a speech at the White House on Tuesday. His administration is grappling with how to publicly underscore the urgency surrounding the highly transmissible variant, while seeking to convey that the U.S. is better prepared to battle the pandemic than it was a year ago…

“This is not a speech about locking the country down,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

Mr. Biden will announce that he is deploying federal emergency medical response teams to six states: Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire and Vermont. He also will instruct Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to prepare to send 1,000 military medical personnel to hospitals in January and February as needed, the officials said.