Las Vegas Casinos need a better, faster and cheaper way to screen visitors at Las Vegas Resorts and this maybe it ......
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and others at the CDC have been touting another testing option that could dramatically change the way we live and interact during the COVID-19 pandemic. What is it? Antigen testing.
Antigen Tests are significantly cheaper and faster than qPCR tests. Quidel, an Antigen Test, has already received FDA approval for their antigen-based test on a strip of paper. This COVID-19 test would cost $1. for each test and report test results in 2 minutes. Many other U.S.-based companies are currently in the process of developing Antigen Tests.
Imagine spitting on a special strip of paper every morning and being told two minutes later whether you were positive for COVID-19. If everyone in the United States did this daily, we would dramatically drop our transmission rates and bring the pandemic under control. Schools and businesses could reopen with the peace of mind that infectious individuals had been identified and were staying home. Michael Mina of the Harvard School of Public Health has been a major proponent of this idea, and has pushed the idea of a $1 test that the government could mass-produce and provide freely to everyone. In fact these technologies exist today.
Why, then, have these cheap and rapid tests not become the foundation of our national testing strategy? The answer lies with test sensitivity.
Antigen tests require higher levels of virus than qPCR to return a positive result. There has been a significant pushback from those who believe it would be irresponsible to widely use a test that might miss many positive cases. But the frequency of testing and the speed of results counters that concern.
The evidence makes clear it is time for a paradigm shift on testing. Our goal should be to identify and prevent every cluster and every outbreak of COVID-19. Cheap and rapid antigen testing can achieve that goal, antigen tests, which detect the presence of viral proteins in a biological sample, such as saliva or tissue swabbed from the nasal cavity
Antigen testing is proven to typically be cheap, return results in minutes, and, like the genetic tests, reveal an active infection. Antigen Tests already exist for strep throat, influenza, tuberculosis, HIV, and other infectious diseases. But so far, only one antigen test for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Lets hope this type of testing is available in Las Vegas soon.......
