“We need to diagnose infections so that we can understand if there are changes in the epidemiology. “This virus is still circulating we still need to diagnose infection, or to identify the people who need to stay home and not transmit their effects to others,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a doctor of public health and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Recode. Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images We have vaccines now, so do we still even need testing?įrom a public health perspective, testing can identify possible outbreaks and virus hot spots, and can detect and track emerging new variants, all of which could help us finally stay ahead of the virus rather than simply reacting to it, as we have for the past year. LabQ claims that their accuracy is 99.7 percent and their turnaround is up to 48 hours. LabQ Diagnostics has mobile Covid-19 testing sites offering free tests all around New York City. Several of those tests will be available over the counter - meaning you don’t need to get a prescription from your doctor, thereby removing another barrier to access. The FDA has started to authorize rapid tests that can be run at home, which many experts see as a major advancement for easy, fast, and accessible Covid-19 testing that could make great strides in heading off outbreaks. Many experts see them as accurate detectors of infectious cases, however, and a useful tool for mass screening programs. But they’re not as sensitive as genetic tests and may miss cases where people have low levels of the virus in their system. How much human potential has been lost?Īntigen tests can give results within minutes and are cheaper than genetic tests. There are also rapid genetic tests, which are faster than the PCR test but not as accurate. In the earliest days of the pandemic, RT-PCR tests were all that were available, so they might be the ones you’re the most familiar with. To get one of these, you can go to a point-of-care site to have a sample collected from your nose (or mouth) and sent to a lab, or you can have a test kit delivered to your home, where you collect your own sample and send it back to a lab yourself. The standard genetic RT-PCR tests require several hours to run (usually returning results within a few days) and are considered the most accurate of Covid-19 tests. There are basically two flavors of Covid-19-detecting tests: molecular, also known as genetic-based tests, which look for the virus’s RNA and antigen tests, which look for proteins on the surface of the virus. Or that it’s important to keep using tests, even after getting vaccinated. At the same time, many people still don’t know how testing works, what’s out there, or why - and how - they should use testing. Soon - maybe within a few weeks - you might even be able to pick up a test at your local pharmacy and do it yourself. Testing might be more important now than ever, and new testing technology and government funding and initiatives are making getting tested faster, easier, and cheaper than it’s ever been. So it would be understandable if you thought there wasn’t a place for testing anymore. As long as we had enough tests and got them in the hands of enough people, we’d be able to identify and contain outbreaks, and life would soon go back to normal.īut now that we have vaccines, death and infection rates are declining, some states are dropping their restrictions, more kids are going back to school, grandparents are giving hugs, and it looks like we’re in for a much safer and better summer than 2020. There was a time when we thought Covid-19 testing would save us from the pandemic.
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