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On Wednesday, the day I recorded this show, I was awake at 4 a.m.

I sat in bed, listening to my toddler sniffle pathetically on the baby monitor.

He would sneeze and then kind of whine and rearrange himself and go back to sleep.

My husband was out of town, and I sat in the dark running through my options.

I needed to work, which meant I needed childcare, which meant I needed to get my kid a COVID test.

My baby's 14 months old. He touches everything.

So the odds were very good that it was just a cold.

But we share child care with another family. And on the off chance he was positive, I couldn't put everyone else at risk.

In this scenario, whether it's your kid, your roommate, or you, is exactly the kind of thing that doctor and epidemiologist Michael Minna is obsessed with. Imagine if within moments of noticing that your toddler

was had a runny nose, had some symptoms that could be COVID, you could just reach into your

cupboard and in five minutes have performed a COVID

test without having to get in the car, bringing him around to potentially infect other people.

I ended up bundling my kid into a stroller, going to two different urgent cares, finding

one that could take us, and thankfully getting a negative rapid test

result, one that allowed me to actually do this interview.

And now just scale that idea up to the many, you know, to hundreds of millions of people

who are kind of going through the same thing on a daily basis.

Minna wants anyone in the situation to have a quick, easy testing option without even leaving the house.

We just have thus far truly neglected to use some of the most powerful tools for no real particularly good reason.

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