New Initiative Puts At-Home Testing to Work in the Fight Against COVID-19

Credit: nito/Shutterstock Thankfully COVID-19 testing is now more widely available than it was earlier in the pandemic. But getting tested often still involves going to a doctor’s office or community testing site and waiting as long as a couple of days for the results. Testing would be so much easier if people could do it themselves at home. If the result came up positive, a person could immediately self-isolate, helping to stop the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, from spreading any further in their communities. That’s why I’m happy to report that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in close collaboration with state and local public health departments and with NIH, has begun an innovative community health initiative called “Say Yes! COVID Test.” The initiative, the first large-scale evaluation of community-wide, self-administered COVID-19 testing, was launched last week in Pitt County, NC, and will start soon in Chattanooga/Hamilton County, TN. The initiative will provide as many as 160,000 residents in these two locales with free access to rapid COVID-19 home tests, supplied through NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative. Participants can administer these easy-to-use tests themselves up to three times a week for one month. The goal is to assess the benefits of self-administered COVID-19 testing and help guide other communities in implementing similar future programs to slow the spread of COVID-19. The counties in North Carolina and Tennessee were selected based on several criteria. These included local infection rates; public availability of accurate COVID-19 tracking data, such as that gathered by wastewater surveillance; the presence of local infrastructure needed to support the project; and existing community relationships through RADx’s Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) program. Taken together, these criteria also help to ensure that vulnerable and underserved populations will benefit from the initiative. The test is called the QuickVue At-Home COVID-19 Test. Developed with RADx support by San Diego-based diagnostic company Quidel, this test is easily performed with a nasal swab and offers results in just 10 minutes. Last week, the test was among several authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for over-the-counter use to screen for COVID-19 at home. Participants can order their QuickVue test kits online for home delivery or local pick up. A free online tool, which was developed with NIH support by CareEvolution, LLC, Ann Arbor, MI, will also be available to provide testing instructions, help in understanding test results, and text message reminders about testing. This innovative tool is also available as a smartphone app. A recent study, supported by the RADx initiative, found that rapid antigen testing for COVID-19, when conducted at least three times per week, achieves a viral detection level on par with the gold standard of PCR-based COVID-19 testing processed in a lab [1]. That’s especially significant considering the other advantages of a low-cost, self-administered rapid test, including confidential results at home in minutes. The Say Yes! COVID Test initiative is an important next step in informing the best testing strategies in communities all over the country to end this and future pandemics. The initiative will also help to determine how readily people accept such testing when it’s made available to them. If the foundational data looks promising, the hope is that rapid at-home tests will help to encourage people to protect themselves and others by following the three W’s (Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Watch your distance), getting vaccinated, and saying “Yes” to the COVID-19 test. Reference: [1] Longitudinal assessment of diagnostic test performance over the course of acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. Smith RL, Gibson LL, Martinez PP, Heetderks WJ, McManus DD, Brooke CB, et al. medRxiv, 2021 March 20. Links: CDC and NIH bring COVID-19 self-testing to residents in two locales, NIH News Release, March 31, 2021 Say Yes! COVID Test Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) (NIH) COVID-19 Testing (CDC) Quidel Corporation (San Diego, CA) Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Continues to Advance Over-the Counter and Other Screening Test Development, FDA News Release, March 31, 2021 NIH Support: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering