“Our entire approach to the pandemic has been case-based surveillance: We have to count every case, and that’s just not accurate anymore,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, a national nonprofit organization representing public health agencies in the United States. “It’s just becoming a time where we’ve got to think about doing things differently.”
There is no comprehensive data on how many rapid tests are used every day, but experts say it is most likely far higher than the number of polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., tests, which are completed in a lab and require more time to deliver results, which are reported publicly as aggregate totals.
At least one at-home test company has implemented a system to report results directly to the health authorities. And some local health departments have set up systems for people to report results from rapid at-home tests. But with such a voluntary system, it is possible that millions of tests per day are going unreported, estimates Mara Aspinall, an expert in biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University who is also on the board of directors of OraSure, which makes rapid Covid tests.
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