Max Minute: What Coronavirus Tests Are In Development?
By Dr. Max Gomez
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Several options are being developed for coronavirus testing, but how do they work and can they help bring the lockdown to an end?
There are a number of plans that have been proposed to get back to normal, and while they differ in a number of details, they all have one thing in common -- testing. Robust, nearly universal testing.
Opening up the economy risks a disastrous resurgence of the virus unless health officials know how widespread the corona infection is in a given area and whether a significant number of those infected had recovered and were presumably immune. Again, that depends on widespread testing.
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There are two broad kinds of tests -- those that look for the virus itself to tell who has an ongoing infection and should be quarantined, even if they are asymptomatic, and an antibody test that can tell if a person had a corona infection, has recovered and is possibly immune to re-infection by the virus.
Right now, less than 1% of the population has been tested for the virus and, by most accounts, present testing is chaotic, scarce, hard to get and can take days to get results.
Yet there are several new faster, cheaper tests that could alleviate that backlog.
Rutgers has started using a saliva test, an Israeli company has one based on genetics, a Syracuse company has a different saliva test and a California company uses an existing diabetes monitor that actually identifies the virus based on a digitized electron microscope picture.
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But a number of tests are languishing in the FDA, awaiting emergency use authorization.
Likewise for antibody testing, a number of companies have developed those tests, although many may be of questionable accuracy. That's where the FDA again has to accelerate its review because without massive testing for the coronavirus, we are courting a second wave of infection and another lockdown.
As one expert put it -- it's not about the date, it's about the data.
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