Best of 2021: Are We Getting COVID Testing All Wrong?
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode originally aired in September.
In the U.S., the PCR test is the gold standard for COVID testing. Common knowledge would have it that the test is more accurate—and therefore more effective at containing the spread of the disease—than the rapid antigen test.
What if that isn’t quite true?
Guest: Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Host: Lizzie O’Leary
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:51.3 | Hey, everyone. This week, we are rerunning one of our best shows of the year. It's from September, |
| 0:58.0 | but it is unfortunately quite relevant again as the Omicron variant spikes and people are desperate |
| 1:04.5 | to get tested for COVID, something that can still be hard to do. At the time, our guest, Michael Minna, was an epidemiologist |
| 1:12.5 | at Harvard. He since moved to E-Med, a rapid testing company. Maybe it's unsurprising that a public |
| 1:18.8 | health expert who had been crying out for more and better testing went to work for a company |
| 1:23.3 | that makes tests, but we wanted to note it anyway. Okay, here's the episode. On Wednesday, |
| 1:31.4 | the day I recorded this show, I was awake at 4 a.m. I sat in bed, listening to my toddler |
| 1:38.0 | sniffle pathetically on the baby monitor. He would sneeze and then kind of whine and rearrange himself and go back to sleep. |
| 1:46.2 | My husband was out of town, and I sat in the dark running through my options. I needed to work, |
| 1:52.8 | which meant I needed child care, which meant I needed to get my kid a COVID test. My baby's 14 |
| 1:59.2 | months old. He touches everything. So the odds were very good that it was just a |
| 2:03.9 | cold. But we share child care with another family. And on the off chance he was positive, |
| 2:10.4 | I couldn't put everyone else at risk. In this scenario, whether it's your kid, your roommate, |
... |
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