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This BD antigen test is remarkable in four ways:
One, it's performed by swabbing the inside of the nose there's no blood draw, and the swab isn't that long one that practically reaches into your brain meaning it doesn't require laboratory personnel. Most people can learn to do this, contrary the FDA's repeated expressions of doubt in the average American's competency. (That doubt is why the FDA has only approved a few COVID-19 tests with at-home sample collection and none with at-home results processing. Meanwhile, average Americans somehow manage to self-administer tests, many with at-home results, for pregnancy, ovulation, ketosis, colon cancer, blood glucose, UTIs, HIV, Lyme Disease, Chlamydia, strep throat, and the composition of our genomes, among other things.)
Two, it only takes about 15 minutes to produce a result.
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Three, it costs just $20 per test with an initial platform cost of around $300, and it's plausible that price could be lowered at scale. Another, similar test, from a company called Quidel Corp., can already be run for as little as $5 per use. Other, cheaper tests intended for daily home use are in development, too. These paper strip tests, even simpler to administer than the swab, would run as low as $1 per use. We'd need them in production to implement the kind of testing I'm suggesting; Becton Dickinson aims to ramp up to making 2 million tests per week by the end of September, which by itself is not nearly enough.
And four, the BD test is capable of 84 percent sensitivity and 100 percent specificity, which means it correctly identifies positive cases 84 percent of the time and negative cases all the time. A few false negatives will slip through, but this is high enough accuracy to make the test enormously useful. It gets us to a risk level that will be acceptable to the vast majority of people. (Frequent testing can also help catch the false negatives.)
