Where are Canada's rapid at-home coronavirus tests?

[oops]

This was posted over 5 weeks ago. Why is the government not addressing it?

 

https://globalnews.ca/news/7469571/coronavirus-canada-rapid-at-home-tests/

 

Posted November 18, 2020 12:13 pm

 

Where are Canada’s rapid at-home coronavirus tests?

Infectious disease experts have been asking themselves — and public health officials — this for months.

“If every Canadian had that in their medicine cabinet, we might be able to test our way out of this,” said Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

Why is this not a priority?

[cannuck]

Excellent question.  There WERE some rapid PCR tests around that could be done at point of care and conceivably be made into home test kits.   Some of these were Canadian and hit the news with great fanfare, but since then, crickets.

There IS also an extremely good development of CRISPR technology to make first a CLIA level complex lab able to run comparable accuracy CRISPR tests on much cheaper and faster equipment but for some reason that has sort of gone quiet too.  I believe a POC (point of care) level of such testing is due for release in next few weeks with home "lab in a packet" test technology not far behind.  CRISPR tech can detect infection within a few hours vs. days for PCR.

The simple and quick tests that have been around for quite a while are serological and rely on antibodies being present.  Too late to be effective in prevention and not nearly the accuracy, but fantastic for doing contact tracing as very inexpensive and not need technicians or professionals to sample and process.

I think you will find that the researchers and developers are hard at it and making great progress, but the media is far too busy spending every waking moment slagging Trump to follow anything that is important.

[oops]

 

On this specific front, the United States is one step ahead of Canada.

On Tuesday, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) authorized its first rapid test that can be performed entirely at home and deliver results in 30 minutes.

The single-use test kit, from California-based Lucira Health, allows users to swab themselves to collect a nasal sample. The sample is then swirled in a vial of laboratory solution that plugs into a portable device. Results are displayed as lights labeled positive or negative.

According to company-run trials, Lucira’s coronavirus tests were able to accurately detect 94.1 per cent of infections, as well as 98 per cent of healthy, uninfected people.

ttps://globalnews.ca/news/7469571/coronavirus-canada-rapid-at-home-tests/

[myata]

Early in the spring of 2020 $1 B was distributed for rapid Covid-19 research and response. Maybe the public should be more interested what happened to it a year on (it's their bucks after all distributed by the bureaucracy to bureaucracy).