Is COVID-19 on airplane air filters? Ever since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become more interested in how well airplane cabins filter and circulate their air. Amanda Morris

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With this support, the researchers will specifically look for evidence of pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, on used filters collected from airplanes. If viruses can be found on filters, then filters from international flights could be used as a new way to track when and where viruses enter the country. Rather than testing travelers individually, it might be possible to monitor entire flights with one test...

Why rapid COVID tests aren't more accurate and how scientists hope to improve them

How much should you trust the results of a rapid antigen test? That's a question many people are asking these days amid recent research and anecdotes suggesting these tests may be less sensitive to omicron. Researchers are working fast to figure out what's going on and how to improve the tests.

That includes people like Dr. Wilbur Lam, a professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at Emory University and one of the lead investigators assessing COVID-19 diagnostic tests for the federal government. His research team began evaluating rapid antigen tests against live samples of the omicron variant last December in the lab, and in early assessments, he says, some tests failed to detect the coronavirus "at a concentration that we would have expected them to catch it if it were another variant."

That finding prompted the Food and Drug Administration to update its online guidance in late December to note that, while rapid antigen tests do detect the omicron variant, "they may have reduced sensitivity."