Why LESS Sensitive Tests Might Be Better

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This video written & produced in collaboration with Aatish Bhatia, https://www.aatishb.com

This video is about how cheap, fast, and LESS sensitive rapid antigen tests might be better for screening (& maybe surveillance) than PCR COVID tests due to the nature of contagiousness/infectiveness at various points on the viral load trajectory of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID sars-COV-2 carriers.

REFERENCES

Thanks to Daniel Larremore for feedback on early versions of this video https://larremorelab.github.io/

Rapid Antigen Testing:

COVID-19 testing: One size does not fit all. https://science.sciencemag.org/conten...

Rethinking Covid-19 Test Sensitivity — A Strategy for Containment. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056...

Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 screening. https://advances.sciencemag.org/conte...

The effectiveness of population-wide, rapid antigen test based screening in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence in Slovakia. (pre-print, not yet peer reviewed) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11...

Effective Testing and Screening for Covid-19. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org...

Brown University & Harvard University modeling of COVID-19 testing shortfall. https://globalepidemics.org/testing-t...

Fast Coronavirus Tests are coming. https://media.nature.com/original/mag...

Open letter signed by epidemiologists and infectious disease experts supporting widespread & frequent rapid antigen testing for COVID-19: https://www.rapidtests.org/expert-letter

More information on various COVID-19 tests: https://chs.asu.edu/diagnostics-commo...

Field performance and public health response using the BinaxNOW Rapid SARS-CoV-2 antigen detection assay during community-based testing. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-...

Performance of an Antigen-Based Test for Asymptomatic and Symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Testing at Two University Campuses. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/w...

Asymptomatic Spread:

People without symptoms spread virus in more than half of cases, CDC model finds https://www.washingtonpost.com/scienc...

(More than half of all) SARS-CoV-2 Transmission From People Without COVID-19 Symptoms. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama...

Three Quarters of People with SARS-CoV-2 Infection are Asymptomatic: Analysis of English Household Survey Data. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

Viral Load Curve:

SARS-CoV-2 viral dynamics in acute infections. (pre-print, not yet peer reviewed)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11...


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