What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcast.

It's Rico Daley. I'm Adam Clark Estes. And this is Lydia DePillas.

I'm a reporter in the DC Bureau of ProPublica, which has a nonprofit investigative newsroom.

Lydia has been looking into a problem with rapid COVID tests, the kind you can get at the local pharmacy and bring home to use.

The problem is that there aren't enough of them and they're too expensive.

So to understand how we got here, first, we need to explain the different kinds of COVID tests and how they work.

The type of test that we saw most often in 2020 was a highly accurate form of test is always administered by a health care provider or someone who's trained to do it.

And that's known as a PCR test. And it detects the actual molecules of the virus itself.

And those are quite accurate, but it can take several days to get results back, depending on how backed up the laboratory is.

So that's not very much use if what you're trying to do is pick up on COVID as soon as you get it and as soon as you're about to become infectious and able to spread the virus to other people.

Then came the serology test, which detects antibodies.

So that can tell you whether you already had COVID.

So not super useful for stemming the spread of the virus, but, you know, nice to know.

And then the third type of test started to become available, something called an antigen test, and that detects the proteins that are attached to the actual SARS virus.

And these tests are not quite as sensitive, meaning they perform better when you have a higher viral load, you have more of this stuff in your nose.

And that's important because that is when you're most able to pass the virus on to others.

And the advantage to them is that you can get results back almost immediately, especially if it is packaged in a home format.

The technology for most of these ad-home tests works almost exactly like a pregnancy test, and it's not that sophisticated technology.

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