A recent Science Magazine article discusses the radical shift in COVID-19 testing needed to reopen schools and businesses.
While the country increased testing throughout the summer, we have not be able to mitigate spread effectively. “Diagnostics experts, public health officials, and epidemiologists are now calling for a radical shift in testing strategy: away from diagnosing people who have symptoms or were exposed and toward screening whole populations using faster, cheaper, sometimes less accurate tests, ” the article explains.
The goal with this approach is to identify and isolate infected individuals more quickly to help stop the spread which is critical to safely reopening schools, factories, and offices.
Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation says testing needs to focus on “massively increasing availability of fast, inexpensive screening tests to identify asymptomatic Americans who carry the virus. Today, we are conducting too few of these types of tests.”
Rebecca Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), agrees. This is required to stop outbreaks from overwhelming communities.
Continue reading the full article and learn more about GovShop’s COVID-19 dataset.
