Rapid Test Blues
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2022
⏱️ 26 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Back in March of 2020, a scientist working at MIT developed a rapid test for the novel coronavirus. It wasn’t quite as accurate as a PCR, but would have gone a long way in detecting infectious cases during the emerging pandemic. But her test was never approved—and today, the U.S. is still behind other developed countries in our mass testing scheme.
Guest: Lydia Depillis, reporter for ProPublica.
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Transcript
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| 0:36.4 | If you needed a COVID test, right now, what is your strategy? Maybe you plan to go |
| 0:44.9 | wait in line for one of those PCR tests that'll get shipped off to a lab. Maybe you've got a |
| 0:50.4 | stash of ad home tests, squirreled away in your bathroom. Or maybe, like a lot of folks, |
| 0:55.5 | you're just hoping you're not going to need a test. I have got five little antigen tests in my |
| 1:02.3 | house and I'm going to parcel them out based on nothing more than a gut reaction. How bad is that |
| 1:08.1 | headache? Just how exposed was my kid? And I'm one of the lucky ones. Even Lydia DePillus, who writes |
| 1:19.5 | about COVID testing over pro-publica, doesn't have a secret for how to get your hands on a nasal swab. I |
| 1:25.5 | didn't have time to go out and get any before they were all gone in the pre-holiday rush. And, you |
| 1:31.1 | know, I don't have kids or a family, so I didn't have, you know, I kind of didn't want to take up the |
| 1:36.2 | supply by ordering a bunch on the internet. So I have a couple now, finally, from the free distributions |
| 1:41.7 | in DC, which started after the holidays very inconveniently, but they are around now. Lydia says |
| 1:49.1 | the shortages you're hearing about now, especially for those at-home tests. Some people call them |
| 1:54.7 | lateral flow tests. They're actually the trickle-down impact of all kinds of other shortages, which is what makes |
| 2:01.3 | fixing this problem so hard. It's not just ordering up a bunch of tests. It's also saying, okay, we have |
| 2:08.9 | factories that need to produce the nitrocellulose strips that go into lateral flow tests. We need to make |
| 2:15.4 | sure there's capacity for producing swabs, like swabs are a huge bottleneck. That kind of thing should |
... |
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