The race to make coronavirus testing as easy as a pregnancy test

Notwithstanding more coronavirus cases than any other country, America has a testing rate beneath some states with lower per-capita rates.

The slow rollout of testing “has crippled us from gaining more progress and opening up the economy,” says Ryan Demmer of the division of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota.

While testing for active infections has much developed since March, tests are still in short supply in some areas around the country. And where tests are easily attainable, results can even take several days.

Now various companies are racing to develop rapid at-home tests. Rather than needing advanced lab equipment for processing, as current criteria do, these new ones would use a specimen collected at home and, like a pregnancy test, give you a simple negative or positive in less than an hour. (These tests are distinct from the COVID-19 home test kit being rolled out that expect you to send a sample to a lab for processing.)

If these rapid tests prove to be affordable, accurate, and easy to manufacture, they could give many more Americans to carry out the COVID-19 tests from home regularly themselves. This could be a massive asset in the fight against the coronavirus, which continues to spread in the US and take thousands of lives a week.

“These tools are urgently required,” says Amanda Castel, a doctor and professor of epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

And for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, testing is particularly important. Demmer says, “because a lot of the transmission occurs from asymptomatic people or pre symptomatic people” — people who don’t have any symptoms of the virus. (In fact, people seem to be most infectious just before they start to have symptoms.)

But there are many caveats to rolling out large-scale, rapid at-home testing for the coronavirus. For instance, the results would need to be shared with public health officials to track cases and trace the contacts of people who test positive, and no one’s put in place a way to do that yet. And these tests, some of which will hopefully have lower accuracy than current PCR tests, are also probably at least a few months away from being available.

Why do we need new tests?

It’s painfully clear that we want faster, more frequent, and more widely available testing for starters.

The current testing process in the US typically needs a healthcare worker wearing personal protective equipment (PPE is still in limited supply in some places) to collect a sample. It then wants a lab to analyze it (which takes hours and expensive machines to amplify the virus’s genetic signature).