Urgency for Rapid Antigen Tests...USA Medical Experts on Board...#WellnessWednesday

"Your daughter wakes up with a scratchy throat, and you can’t decide whether she should go to school."

"You can’t shake a runny nose and start wondering whether it’s really because of allergies."

"You’re planning a family gathering, but you are nervous about your aging parents being there."

"Millions of Americans are grappling with situations like these, and there is a straightforward solution to all of them. But that solution is not widely available in the United States, even though the technology exists and is being used in much of Western Europe."

"The solution is rapid testing.""

Rapid testing — more formally known as antigen testing — allows people to learn within minutes whether they are carrying enough of the Covid-19 virus to be contagious. With this knowledge, infectious people can stay home and quarantine before they infect others. Everybody else can carry on with life."

"Biden’s new Covid action plan, announced this month, calls for an expansion of rapid testing, although it seems unlikely to be big enough to make rapid tests widely available. “The recognition by the president that this is a tool we haven’t been using yet, and we should be using, is a massive step forward,” Mina told me. But, he added, “It’s woefully inadequate.”

"Elizabeth Stuart, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently wrote: “I am more and more convinced we need to dramatically increase access and affordability of at-home rapid antigen Covid-19 tests.” Zoë McLaren, a health economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, added: “So many preventable deaths are on the line.”