For all governments, the question of tests to detect Covid-19 is a real headache. On the one hand, the most reliable PCR tests are still rare in many countries and require medical personnel, on the other hand we find less precise but less expensive and therefore more easily generalized. To help politicians make a choice, researchers in the United States are campaigning for the adoption of rapid tests at a dollar, repeatable several times a week by the entire population.
To be done at home as a pregnancy test
Michael Mina, professor of epidemiology at Harvard, has been advocating for weeks for what he has called shoddy, “bad” or more colloquially “crappy” tests. The idea is to break away from the current PCR model, for which people often queue for hours, and wait days, or even a week, for results. The American drug agency (FDA) must therefore, according to him, authorize the marketing of rapid tests, made at home from a strip of paper that would change color in a quarter of an hour to give the result, such as a pregnancy test.
The problem is that these tests have low sensitivity, ie they miss a lot of positive cases and therefore give many "false negatives". But for Michael Mina, this strategy would be more effective in terms of public health since at the population level, the number of identified cases would be greater than at present. These rapid tests are good on average at detecting people who shed a lot of viruses, that is, when they are very contagious, at the very beginning, while PCR tests are very sensitive and even detect low concentrations of the virus. , which happens at the end of the illness, when people are hardly contagious anymore.
"Not so bad" tests
The scientist is not the only expert to defend this idea. The director of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, Ashish Jha, has also stepped up to support his colleague. Monday, he even wanted to reassure by explaining that "these tests are not so bad". According to him, “when you are very contagious, and you have a lot of viruses in your throat and elsewhere, the test improves a lot”. However, “from an epidemiological point of view, this is exactly the moment when we want to detect people”.
Even if the rapid test misses half of the cases, it is likely that with two tests per week, it will eventually catch them. Experts recall that in addition, the current system misses nine out of ten cases, since relatively few people are screened, according to estimates from the Centers for the Fight against Diseases.
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