Harvard researchers plead for ‘bad tests’ to screen for Covid-19

THE ESSENTIAL

• The tests are carried out using a strip of paper that would change color in a quarter of an hour.
• They only cost about a dollar.
• The US drug agency (FDA) has not yet authorized the marketing of these tests.

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In the fight against the coronavirus, all means are good. Researchers at Harvard University in the United States advocate accelerating and increasing screening tests. In this sense, they are campaigning for the development of homemade tests, which look like pregnancy tests and cost only around a dollar. From a strip of paper that would change color in a quarter of an hour, they quickly give a result. If their reliability remains doubtful, they allow at least to put the finger on the biggest contagious ones.

Inexpensive tests …

The current method of screening for Covid-19 consists of high-precision molecular tests (PCR tests) which are still too rare in a large part of the United States. It is to fill these gaps that Michael Mina, professor of epidemiology at Harvard, has been campaigning for weeks for what he called poor quality tests. However, they are far from useless since they would make it possible to identify many more cases than at present. “We are so committed to high-end and expensive testing that we don’t test anyone, lamented Michael Mina recently in the podcast This Week in Virology. Maybe we just need a null test. If it’s so cheap that it can be used frequently, then it might detect 85% of people with contagious disease, instead of less than 5%”.

The other strong point of these tests is their cost: only about a dollar. This allows you to buy several and get tested several times a week. Given their effectiveness on the most contagious people, at the start of the infection, they would thus allow better anticipation and maximum avoidance of contamination. “These tests are not so bad, said the director of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, Ashish Jha. When you are very contagious, and you have a lot of viruses in your throat and elsewhere, the test improves a lot. From an epidemiological point of view, this is exactly the moment when we want to detect people”.

… not yet authorized

The current ineffectiveness of the tests means that nine out of ten cases are missed according to the estimates of the Centers for the fight against diseases. This is due to the fact that too few people get tested because of the cost and the sometimes endless queues in front of the testing sites. The US Medicines Agency (FDA) has yet to authorize any of these homemade tests. “I fear our federal government is stuck in an insane thinking pattern for this pandemic”, Regretted Ashish Jha.

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