After struggling to ramp up coronavirus testing, the US can now screen several million people daily, thanks to a growing supply of rapid tests. But the boom comes with a new challenge: keeping track of the results
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A medical worker inserts a sample into an Abbott Laboratories ID NOW rapid COVID-19 test machine at San Francisco International Airport.“Schools certainly don’t have the capacity to report these tests,” said Dr Jeffrey Engel of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “If it’s done at all it’s likely going to be paper-based, very slow and incomplete.”Early in the outbreak, nearly all US testing relied on genetic tests that could only be developed at high-tech laboratories.
Large hospitals and laboratories electronically feed their results to state health departments, but there is no standardised way to report the rapid tests done elsewhere. And state officials have often been unable to track where these tests are being shipped and whether results are being reported. Even before Abbott's newest BinaxNOW rapid tests hit the market last month, undercounting was a concern.
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