You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Maddie's to fight here with NPR Health Correspondent Rob Snine.

Rob, I miss you, buddy.

I miss you, Maddie. It's so nice to hear your voice.

You too, Rob. So, okay. I think by now we have all heard that testing is key to our ability

to reopen the country in a safe way. Let's remind folks of why that is.

Right. Ideally, we need to catch as many new infections as possible to try to prevent

new outbreaks from exploding around the country. More testing could also help reopen the economy

safely by testing people before they go back to work or even when they get on a plane.

Yeah. So, there are a few different tests that scientists use for some of those scenarios

that we just talked about. We are going to cover each of them in a bit.

Bottom line, Rob, is that we need more testing of all kinds.

Yeah. Testing capacity is going up, which is good, but it's still nowhere near where we need it to be.

For example, the basic diagnostic test, the one that tells you if you have the virus right now,

we need a lot more of that. That's the long swab up the nose, tickle the brain one.

Yeah. Experts say you want no more than 10% of those tests to come back positive.

That's because if you have a high percentage of tests that are positive, it's clear there's

not enough testing going on to capture enough of the infected people in the community.

So, you want to be around 10% and right now that number in the US is more like maybe 16, 18,

maybe even as high as 20%. So, yeah, we need a lot more testing.

Right, which is where a new diagnostic test comes in. A test you're here to talk about today,

it's called an antigen test. The FDA just approved the first one on Friday.

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