Opinion | Beat Covid Without a Vaccine

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it’ll be mid-2021 before a Covid-19 vaccine is available in quantities sufficient to “get back to our regular life.” Does that mean nine more months of lockdown? Not necessarily. There’s an alternative: repeated, frequent, rapid at-home testing. At least one such test, Abbott Labs ’ BinaxNOW, is already being produced for the government. Others are in development.

Details vary, but each is simple enough to be self-administered. With the BinaxNow test, you swab the front of your nose, insert the swab into one side of a small card, add saline to the other side, close the card, and see if the reader on the front lights up green or red. A phone app records a negative result for use as a digital passport.

Asking those presumed to be infectious to stay home would cut transmission chains, ending Covid outbreaks within weeks. Each transmission stopped may prevent hundreds more. This isn’t herd immunity, but it has the same effect. Like vaccines, the tests don’t have to be perfect. It’s enough to drop the virus’s reproductive number below 1.

Cornell University’s quick defeat of its Covid cluster shows the power of frequent testing. Cornell tests all undergraduates twice a week and quarantines those who are positive. After an unauthorized party, Cornell had 60 positive cases a week before starting surveillance testing. It now has about three a week.

Frequent at-home rapid testing could help keep outbreaks at bay and restore the economy. Health departments would ensure that hot-zone populations get priority access. Digital passports would be required, like masks, to go to work, attend school, make reservations, enter stores, etc. Private-sector requirements would strongly encourage collective compliance

opinion Kotlikoff michaelmina_lab wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands

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