![]() ![]() Mina said that limits the test’s potential, because it can’t be used to detect people who carry the virus but don’t show symptoms, and asymptomatic and presymptomatic people are thought to transmit a substantial percentage of infections. It cannot be used to test people at any time, an approach that is often called screening. Although its performance was impressive, the number of samples was far smaller than would be tested under normal circumstances-just 102.Īlso, the FDA’s authorization allows Abbott’s test to be used only on people with symptoms of COVID-19 within seven days of the onset of their symptoms. ![]() So, to gain acceptance, Abbott showed data confirming that its test was able to classify a pool of samples in nearly the same way as PCR tests of the same samples. Antigen tests such as this one detect viral protein and are less sensitive than the gold-standard PCR tests, which detect viral RNA. The fine details of the FDA’s emergency use authorization, the regulatory sign-off that allows a test to be sold, are significant. “This is the type of test that we’ve been waiting for, but may not be the test,” Mina told me. Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has pushed for the deployment of this kind of rapid test, was not ready to declare that the new era had begun. Read: The plan that could give us our lives backĪbbott’s test itself is not quite the fulfillment of that grand vision, though-at least not yet. At a time when so many people are desperate to escape the pandemic, this kind of testing holds the tantalizing promise of a pre-vaccine way out of the quagmire. Deployed widely and often enough, tests like Abbott’s might allow for kids to return to school, office workers to head back to cubicles, and essential employees who have been working throughout the pandemic to have a greater degree of safety. Many experts have hailed Abbott’s new test as a huge milestone, and a rapid acceleration toward a plan that could give Americans back some sense of normalcy. For comparison, states have reported fewer than 75 million tests total over the past six months, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. This morning, the Trump administration announced that it would be purchasing 150 million of these tests from the company. This test requires only a coated-paper card and a small swab, and the scale of its production is stunning: Abbott says it will begin manufacturing 50 million of these tests a month in October. In the afternoon, the health-care company Abbott announced that it had received FDA authorization to distribute a new type of test. Yesterday morning, all of the tests for COVID-19-traditional or rapid-that had received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration required an expensive machine and cost around $40 or more. In 24 hours, the testing landscape of the United States has transformed. ![]()
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