Tech is available to halt second wave of Covid-19, but we must use it

Bioengineers from the University of Antioquia work on the prototype of an emergency ventilator in Medellin, Colombia, on April 30, 2020 amid the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic. Picture: JOAQUIN SARMIENTO / AFP

That’s true, but in the end, her valid message was lost, which was that there’s evidence that the primary driver of the disease appears to be people who do get sick; that they can spread the disease before they get sick; and that fatalities can be prevented by finding people with symptoms, tracking down their recent contacts, and isolating those who test positive.

While some surveillance can be done with excess existing tests, we would do even better to deploy faster, cheaper, easier tests. MIT professor and biotech founder Lee Gehrke and colleague Irene Bosch have developed one of those testing technologies — a so-called antigen test, which can pick up an active infection using a test strip, like a pregnancy test.

Antigen tests, on the other hand, can save lives by detecting active infections. Experts say these tests tend to have a low rate of sensitivity — they catch only about 80% of infections. A report in Science says antigen tests find true positives between 50% and 90% of the time. But that’s still useful if they’re used for randomly sampling people to locate possible outbreaks.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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