Tests: Several companies are trying to develop better COVID-19 home tests

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Mon, 2021-12-27 12:11 — mike kraft

On a yacht off St. Barts, the future of covid testing is taking shape Amid huge gaps in inventory and quality, several renegade companies are looking for a superior approach to the current tangled system. Steven Zeitchik Washington Post

NEW YORK — On Wednesday afternoon, scientist Jonathan Rothberg was sitting on his boat-laboratory in the northeastern Caribbean parsing the future of coronavirus testing. About 1,500 nautical miles away, on a decidedly nontropical First Avenue in Manhattan, the lines stretched a block long, as the masked weary queued up for hours outside a mobile coronavirus testing site.

“You want to see my covid testing line?” Rothberg asked when a reporter on the other end of the Zoom told him of the contrast. Rothberg — a DNA-sequencing pioneer who once won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama — picked up an oddly shaped white box and placed it on the desk in front of him. “Here, this is my covid testing line.” ...

... Rothberg and several rivals are continuing to reach for the coronavirus-diagnostic holy grail: the speed and convenience of an at-home test with the accuracy of a lab one. While their plan is taking shape during omicron, they dream of a much bigger shift. They hope consumers eventually can test themselves at home for everything from the flu to sexually transmitted diseases, in a kind of radical reshaping of the medical-testing process. ...

More than 200,000 new coronavirus cases are now being documented in the country every day, yet it’s surprisingly hard to be counted among them. Long wait times abide for the lab-based molecular tests commonly called PCRs — hours to get swabbed, one to two days for the results. Meanwhile, the at-home antigen tests (among the brands you will probably find to be out of stock at your local CVS are Abbott BinaxNOW, Quidel QuickVue and Ellume) are not only unavailable but are also rife with false negatives. ...

Experts describe the new tech as part of a pattern in which tests continually get better without ever being perfect, a dance between inadequacy and innovation.

“I expect technology will continue to evolve to be more accurate, especially as we learn more, but it is also possible that viral evolution will push us to create ever better technology to keep up,” said Jennifer Schneider, an expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has extensively studied testing.

Her colleague, associate professor Maureen Ferran, said that at-home molecular tests are a welcome development but that antigen tests can also be more accurate if "used in conjunction with monitoring for symptoms of covid” and if people isolated and followed up with a lab test. Others point out that, as a general indicator, antigen tests still reflect broad coronavirus trends. ...

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