U.S. plans further for producing cheap, fast tests for Covid-19

Photo Credits: Reuters

U.S. manufacturers are working to further increase the production of a large batch of Covid-19 tests which will be cheap, give speedy results but will be less accurate. The objective is to aim for 100 million testing per month for the year that will ease out on the schools and workplaces to further increase the testing.

Planned production with respect to new tests when collaborating approved diagnostics, the monthly testing capacity will exceed 200 million each month till the following year. U.S. Regulators in the past few months have given authorization to antigen tests from Abbot Laboratories, Becton Dickinson & Co, Quidel Corp and Lumira DX.

Regulators and health experts have particularly raised concerns about antigen test reliability. Their probability of detecting the virus is from 80 to 90 %, lower than the lab accuracy of 95%. Also, there is a risk associated to spread of contagion for false-negative results.

Around 25 million tests were carried out in US or the month of August, which is inclusive of the lab and antigen tests as per the data by University of Oxford. Presently, U.S. has the ability to conduct 3 million tests each day for the month, which includes half of them as antigen tests. This would end the October month with 135 million monthly tests, as ordained by a top US congressional panel.