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At Home Testing Rush for Covid19-The Panagora Blog
The race is on. Tech startups across the globe are competing to deliver to the rest of us what Google employees already enjoy: regular at-home COVID tests.
At-home medical testing was gaining steam pre-pandemic and is now a red-hot market with more than two dozen companies developing at-home COVID tests.
Lucira Health, the first company to get FDA approval for a fully at-home test (with no mail delay sending to the lab), filed for an IPO last week and expects to deliver its test nationally this spring.
Lucira’s test is about as easy as an at-home pregnancy test: Patients swab their nostrils, stir the sample into a vial, and plug it into a small box. After about 30 minutes, lights indicate a positive, negative, or invalid result. The not-so-silver-lining: The test requires a doctor’s prescription and costs $50, putting regular checks out of reach for many.
Computer simulations suggest that if Americans got tested every one to three days, transmission could be reduced by more than 80% — enough to conceivably put a rapid end to the epidemic. But experts say the tests would need to come down significantly in costs — as low as 50 cents — for this to happen.
Last month FDA approved a second fully at-home test, from Ellume, that tests for antigens rather than RNA, making it cheaper and easier to manufacture. The good news: The test will be available over the counter and deliver results in 15 minutes. The not-so-good-news: At $30, it’s still relatively expensive.
One of the leaders in at-home medical testing, Everlywell, is raising money seeking a $1B valuation. The company offers a COVID test among its menu options. Like tests offered by Quidel and others, patients collect a sample at home and ship it to get results within a few days.
Others developing tests include AI company Gauss Surgical, Safe Health Systems, and BioIQ Inc., which partnered with Google to offer weekly at-home tests to the company’s 90k employees.
The upshot: Rapid at-home COVID testing is on its way. But, at least for now, it’ll cost you if you want to do it regularly.
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In the US ,about 405,000 people have died.Many countries are seeing red trying to contain the Covid-19 so this home testing strategies will pay off for as long as Covid-19 exists
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