Pressure rises for rapid COVID-19 testing

Pressure rises for rapid COVID-19 testing The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed has now helped achieve the remarkable success of two vaccines shown to be highly effective in preventing COVID-19. Peter Sullivan TheHill

The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed has now helped achieve the remarkable success of two vaccines shown to be highly effective in preventing COVID-19. But pressure is rising for a similar push from the administration in a different area key to fighting the pandemic: rapid testing.

Despite the success with vaccines, they will not be widely available to the general public for several months, even as hospitalizations and deaths continue to spike heading into a brutal winter.

A vocal group of experts say that widespread rapid testing could help drastically slow the spread of the virus until a vaccine is widely available, and help open businesses and schools.

But such tests have not gotten off the ground, despite the technology existing. Backers point to regulatory barriers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a lack of government investment in ramping up manufacturing of the tests to the millions per day that would be needed. 

President-elect Joe Biden is calling for stronger government action. In a speech in October, he called for a “faster, cheaper screening test, that you can take right at home or in school,” and his transition team’s coronavirus plan includes a call to “invest in next-generation testing, including at home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.”

President Trump, in contrast, has frequently downplayed the need for more testing. 

“We have leadership in the country, [and] they don't realize they’re leaders,” said Michael Mina, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has been advocating for rapid tests for months. “The number of people I've talked to who say, ‘Well, why isn't this happening?’ and my only answer is, ‘Because you're not doing it.’ ”

he tests Mina and others are pushing for are simple paper strips that could be mass-produced so that every household in the U.S. could have a supply, and use them multiple times per week. Someone could know whether they are positive for coronavirus by whether a line shows up on the paper strip or not, within minutes....

Not everyone is fully on board, though, including, crucially, the FDA.

Some experts raise concerns that the rapid tests are not as accurate as the standard tests currently being relied on, and that people could get a false negative from a rapid test and then go out and infect others. Another concern is that if people are taking tests at home, they will not be reporting their results to public health authorities, and the country will lose out on data on where the virus is spreading. ...