Diagnostics True positives
When they work, Covid-19 tests are good for one yes or no question. If only deciding how to use them were so simple. Repeatedly, mass testing programmes using lateral flow tests have foundered on the risks of false negatives, but the more reliable PCR tests remain too costly to implement on a wide enough scale. Abi Millar speaks to Niraj Jha, co-founder of AI company NeuTigers, Timothy Plante from the University of Vermont and Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, about using machine learning, wearables and even CRISPR to find a middle path out of the pandemic.
s the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out continues, many countries remain stuck in what feels like indefinite lockdown. Restrictions are poised to continue in most places until some critical threshold of immunisation has been reached – with bars, restaurants and even workplaces stubbornly out of bounds and population-wide curfews in place. Austria, however, has hit on a different solution. Rather than waiting for the EU’s centralised vaccine programme to provide enough doses to inoculate its population, the small European nation, which suffered particularly badly in the second wave, is banking on extensive Covid-19 testing as the best way to reopen
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public life. It has said it will make 3.5 million free Covid tests available to its 8.8 million citizens each week – freeing them to get their hair cut or visit a ski resort, on the proviso of a recent negative test. “We are on the way to becoming the testing world champion,” announced the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in late February. “Our goal is to be able to control the incidence of infection, or at least mitigate any growth in infection numbers, as best we can, by testing as much as possible.” Austria isn’t the first country to think along these lines. In June 2020, China completed a mass testing programme in Wuhan, the centre of the original
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Practical Patient Care /
www.practical-patient-care.com
elenabsl; hvostik/
Shutterstock.com
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